


a day, a week, a month, a year

by vampireinvitations



Series: more heat than light [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Blood, Blow Jobs, Body Horror, Bondage, Caning, Clothed Sex, Codependency, Dominance, Edgeplay, Emotional Manipulation, Enemies to Lovers, Extremely Dubious Consent, Flogging, Gore, Grooming, Hand Jobs, Japanese Rope Bondage, M/M, Masochism, Murder, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Rimming, Rough Oral Sex, Sadism, Stockholm Syndrome, Submission, Tentacle Sex, Torture, Unreliable Narrator, Vampires, Whipping, i am god emperor of the trash and you have been warned, like seriously so much violent content you guys, look if it causes an orgasm it’ll probably be in here somewhere, not even tagging as h/c because there will be no comfort found here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 16:36:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 31,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9557393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vampireinvitations/pseuds/vampireinvitations
Summary: A thin, bitter smile reached Vincent's lips. "I spent too much time as a monster to return as a man."In which a British vampire is imprisoned and tortured into Stockholm syndrome by an immortal Russian crime lord, in the name of love.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Visit me on [tumblr](http://vampireinvitations.tumblr.com) if you like!

_prologue._

As soon as he walked through the holdout door, Cameron's heart stopped.  
  
Blood and viscera coated the room in scarlet, with broken bodies scattered haphazardly around it. There must have been ten—no, fifteen—victims, mostly men from the heads he could see. The smell clung to the back of his throat. He refused to throw up here. He would not.  
  
But that wasn't the worst part. No, what stopped his heart was the man in the corner of the room, drenched in blood, who had just ripped out the entrails of the last victim. Cameron knew the man, knew every knuckle, every vertebra, every hair. He had been missing for eighteen months, and Cameron had never stopped searching for him.  
  
His name was Vincent.  
  
Abruptly he looked up, locking eyes with Cameron. The man paused briefly in surprise, but composed himself and jumped out of the second-story window before Cameron could even say anything.  
  
When the rest of the team arrived, they thought it was Cameron's first slaughterhouse. He couldn't tell them he had just seen a ghost.

 

* * *

A torn white note fluttered from Cameron's door as he entered his flat. In angular block letters, it read, "22:00 Tinseltown".  
  
He clenched the note in his fist as he was thrown into a turbulent sea of emotions. It was 21:15.  
  
He grabbed his coat.

 

* * *

Tinseltown was a cafe and fry-up in Farringdon open until four in the morning, spacious and well-kept and full of life. When Cameron had rented his flat here a few years ago, it had become a haven for a young man and his vampire who needed a place to meet at odd hours. They also served pretty good milkshakes.  
  
Though it was too late for dinner guests and too early for drunken revelers, there were a few patrons. An older couple seated at the bar. A young woman in a booth by the kitchen. And, in the corner furthest from the door and away from the attention, a wan young man with long dark hair, wearing sunglasses though night had long since fallen.  
  
Cameron hesitated, so many questions spinning in his head. He had no idea how Vincent could even be here. None of this made sense. Ravenscroft killed all of his victims; he never let them walk free. Mentally Cameron shook himself free of such thoughts and concentrated on the now. Vincent was here, and what was more, he seemed willing to talk.  
  
Cameron slid into the green vinyl booth opposite Vincent and tried not to look nervous. He offered a small smile. "Hey," he said.  
  
Vincent shifted slightly, inscrutable black lenses focusing on Cameron, and he said quietly, "Long time no see."

Up close his friend wasn't just wan, but grey. He looked ill. In contrast to this, the black-on-black suit he was wearing was exquisitely tailored, bespoke, and cost more than Cameron made in a month. His sunglasses were old-fashioned-looking circle lenses in gold wire frames. They, too, were probably expensive. An untouched cup of coffee sat near his elbow growing cold.  
  
Cameron was stuck. He wanted to blurt out so many questions, wanted to hold his boyfriend in his arms, wanted to celebrate their reunion—But something was missing. _He_ was missing something.  
  
"I... don't have a lot of time, I'm sorry," Vincent continued. "I just... thought... you would want me to extend the invitation in person." His voice was different, the baritone that was once clear and forthright now flat and husky with disuse. No, Cameron realized. Not disuse. Overuse. His voice had been broken from screaming.  
  
He clenched his fists under the table. "Invitation?"  
  
"I want you to meet me at Hither Green Chapel, midnight, two days from now. We can talk then. But you need to come armed. I'm afraid there have been... rather too many unsavory types following me lately."  
  
Vincent moved to go, and Cameron panicked, grabbing his sleeve. "Wait," Cameron said, softer than he meant to. He cleared his throat, trying not to sound desperate as he asked, "Can't I at least see your face?"  
  
Vincent's face tightened. "You... I promise you, you don't want that."  
  
"Please, Vincent," Cameron said. Now he couldn't help the desperation in his voice. _I can't let you walk out of here without really seeing you_ , he thought.  
  
Vincent shifted back into the seat. After a moment, gloved hands grasped the glasses and pulled them from his face. Cameron's breath caught in his throat.  
  
Where once Vincent's eyes had been a rich chestnut—sly, lively, and a little sad—now they were slitted and sickly, the color of old gold, iris thickly rimmed with blood. Black bags nestled beneath his eyes, bruise purple surrounding them, making them appear sunken.  
  
Cameron whispered, "Tell me what happened."  
  
A thin, bitter smile reached Vincent's lips. He placed the glasses back on his face and stood up, placing a five-pound note on the table.  
  
"I spent too much time as a monster to return as a man."  
  
And he walked away.

 

* * *

Hither Green was a lesser-known cemetery and garden in Catford, noted for its parakeet roost, of all things. The chapel itself was abandoned, fenced off and boarded up to the public, but given the nature of Vincent's work, Cameron assumed that was intentional.  
  
On a misty, dark night in November, the chapel's understated Gothic spires and Victorian construction provided an appropriately eerie atmosphere. Just as Cameron was reaching for his torch, a light appeared in the window, and the door to the vestibule creaked open.  
  
The irony of a vampire in a church was not lost on either of them, though years ago Vincent had explained that the only thing preventing a vampire from entering any building was its threshold, the aura a building manifested from inhabitants. There was no harm in hallowed ground, and having faith did not help victims or hinder their attackers. Religion was a construct of man, and had no bearing on the undead.  
  
Cameron headed toward the light, through the lobby to the nave. The pews had been stacked on one side, though it appeared at least one had been smashed into pieces, splinters strewn on the floor. Most of the windows had been boarded over, but for the tiny rose windows whose glass was shattered and through which no vandal could hope to pass.  
  
No light source presented itself despite the nave being lit in strong golden-white light, enough to read comfortably in. Also lacking was a Christ figure or cross looming over the apse, where the altar would have stood; presumably it had been transported to another church or museum. Dusty shadows where the altar and statue had stood were all that marked them.  
  
"Hello again," Vincent said, detaching from the shadows. He didn't look any better today, though that had been a slim hope at best. The suit he wore could have been the same one; still finely crafted, form-fitting, unwrinkled. The only thing different was that he had left the sunglasses behind.  
  
So many responses cycled through Cameron's mind. _I've missed you_ seemed too forward, _hello_ too formal. What was he to say to someone he thought long lost? _How have you been_ was out of the question.  
  
"Hi," he said. He thought this would be... Not easier. More hopeful, perhaps. This felt like a funeral, if he was honest with himself. Unsure how to start his questions, he went sideways with them. "Where is the light coming from?"  
  
"Ah, that is..." From his trouser pocket Vincent produced a pen-like instrument a centimeter in diameter and maybe ten centimeters long, with a domed button at one end. "This provides enough light for one hour, scattering the particles when the button is pressed. After an hour, they will dissipate, and the room will return to darkness. It was a loan from my... employer."  
  
He paused before the word, and Cameron finally understood. He could feel the anger twist his face but couldn't stop it from showing. "You mean Ravenscroft."  
  
"Yes," Vincent said. There was no way to deny it.  
  
Everything made a perverted kind of sense now. A year ago, Ravenscroft had mailed Vincent's severed arm to the SIS building, addressing it to Cameron, but they had never found the rest of his body. The memory of that box still haunted Cameron, made him sick.

"Tell me what happened. I... You lived through it. The least I can do is listen," Cameron said, watching Vincent's expression.  
  
There was no reaction. Vincent's face was as impassive as marble. Countering Cameron's request, he said, "How does it feel, seeing my eyes like this? Is it painful? Heartbreaking? Infuriating?"  
  
Frustrated that Vincent was dodging the question, Cameron resolved to beat him at his game of emotional manipulation. "I've seen those eyes before. It doesn't mean anything. It means you're you."  
  
"Does it?" Vincent said softly. "That wasn't what you thought two days ago. Seeing them made you forget to breathe, made your heart skip a beat. I tried to protect you from that, if you recall. But you wanted to see. Even now, you can't look me in the eye, can you? It hurts too much." He turned his back on Cameron. "I was sentimental to ask you to come here. You should leave, before you get hurt."  
  
Angry now, Cameron stepped forward, placing a heavy hand on Vincent's shoulder and forcing him back around. They locked eyes, and Cameron refused to look away, even though Vincent had been right on all counts. "You let me see you, the first time. You're damn right you're sentimental! Stop playing the Byronic hero as if you’re better off alone. You need me, and you know it. And you already know I'm here for you no matter what it takes. So _tell me_ your goddamn story."  
  
Vincent shrugged Cameron's arm off, but stayed put. His face was marble once more. He stood there, eyeing Cameron, until he came to a decision. He looked down, avoiding Cameron’s gaze, losing this round.  
  
“The first days, he was just gauging my stamina,” he began.

 

* * *

i.

_eighteen months earlier_

The needle slid deep into Vincent’s neck, contents of the syringe flooding into him. He turned fast, the point breaking off in his skin, but already the world was starting to liquefy. Taking a step was like trying to stay upright in a heaving gale, throwing him to his knees as he reached for the man before him. He fell to the floor, spine fluid, waves of languor engulfing his body. The last thing he registered before unconsciousness was a soft brush against his cheek.

Hours, maybe days, later he opened his eyes to a dirty concrete cell, bound to a saltire cross. Already his skin felt a size too small, the inside of his mouth scraping against his tongue like carpet. His clothes were gone, cool air caressing his flesh, almost chill enough to give him goosebumps. He tried to straighten and appear in control, but his shoulders ached from bearing his weight, tightened now and angry at every stretch he demanded of them. The door creaked open.  
  
A dead-eyed Achilles strode over the threshold, familiar in face and alien in aspect. Vincent marveled at the small changes that created an entirely different person; a proud lift to the shoulders where before was a casual slouch, a slight sneer that had been a warm smile. But the most obvious change was in his eyes. Not only had Nick’s eyes been friendly and content, lined with laughter and most often found smiling, but they had been a warm hazel. This man’s eyes were cold and an odd shade of purple, like sprigs of lavender. Vincent had never seen a person with eyes like that.  
  
"Ah, _lyubimiy_ ," the man said. "I’ve waited so long to meet you." His inflection was strange, a curious mishmash of London and Russian accents, delivered in a wry tone that was surprisingly subdued for a man accustomed to power. "I am sorry about the sedative; it can be hell on nonhumans.”  
  
Vincent licked cracked lips with a tongue that felt like leather, and resisted the urge to cough. “You know, you could have taken me without the act.”

The man’s lips curled. It might have been a smile, had it reached more than his lips. “I could have, but I didn't. It was fun to be Nick, for a little while. Fun to pretend life was simpler. But… A man has needs,” he said, stretching something wet and red between his hands, on display.

As Vincent registered the shape, everything became clear.

“Her name was Maritza Rodriguez. I skinned her two days ago, in a motel in Barcelona. She was so sad, and soft, and as I flayed her she cried so many tears I could have drowned…”

In his mind’s eye, Vincent saw a flash of red-stained fingers clutching at a slit throat, and flinched.

Recovering, he said, "So I'm here to be made an example of to the intelligence officers at the SIS." He didn't say, to Cameron, but it was there between the lines. He laughed softly, bitterly, and continued, "But of course they weren't finding any more on you than you wanted them to find. So why bother with me, when you already had them wrapped around your finger?"  
  
The man gazed impassively back at him. After a moment, he simply said, "I needed a vampire. You were the most... useful... choice."  
  
Vincent felt the click in his throat as he swallowed, a chill in his guts. “If you aren’t Nick Reynolds, then who are you?”

A flash of teeth, something in his wide smile that lit the room with an icy glow. “My name is Ravenscroft. Nikolay Ravenscroft. Doctor, scientist, visionary. But you! You’re Vincent MacLachlan, scourge of Tangier, the monster of MI6 who only comes out at night.”  Ravenscroft bowed low, deferential.

“It is my utmost pleasure,” he said, and those simple words sent deep shivers down Vincent’s spine. Part déjà vu, part apprehension.

Ravenscroft straightened. “I must take my leave,” he said, “but I will return.”

Of this, Vincent had no doubt.

 

* * *

Not long after Vincent completed his training at the SIS, he was assigned to the team in the serious crime division assisting Scotland Yard. They and other agencies cooperated in hunting down one of the most intelligent, baffling serial murderers in the Eastern Hemisphere. Not even Garavito, Xinhai, Onoprienko, the most prolific recreational killers in recent memory, could hold a candle to this ghost.

One day a body appeared in downtown Atlanta; headless, spine exposed, ribs removed, lungs pulled out from behind. Not just left to be found, but displayed in all its twisted glory. All of the victim’s injuries were inflicted while they still lived, without anesthetic, and lacking any evidence of sexual assault. Atlanta police were on the lookout for another victim, yet the very next day in Shanghai the same cause of death resurfaced, also publically displayed.

He wasn’t just fulfilling his desires, this killer. He was taunting them, daring the law to catch him, flagrant in his depravity.

Yet they searched and searched, and found nothing.

It was six years ago now that Vincent had encountered his vampire creator.  
  
He had been stationed in Tangier, which had developed an uncharacteristic influx of heroin, possibly as part of a trade route. He was to infiltrate the local drug lord's group and make himself indispensable to them, but as he climbed the rungs of the hierarchy there he realized that this drug lord was someone else's puppet. This was fortuitous for Tangier in the short run but brought Vincent nothing but hardships once the dust settled.  
  
The drug lord, Aubert Descoteaux, was a French expat with too much money and too little sense. He had run afoul of his family and been given enough money to go wherever he wished as long as it was not France, so he came to Tangier hoping for excitement.  
  
He also had a very nasty problem with raping and strangling young girls.  
  
Vincent couldn't pinpoint when the ghostly girl had shown up in Descoteaux's group exactly. Some said it was only a few weeks before he did, others swore on their lives that she had always been with them, a tiny shadow. There were enough disparate accounts that it became a guessing game. She was small and thin, maybe eleven years old, before the ripening touch of puberty. Her skin was odd; smooth, rose-touched, and tawny, with an undertone of faintest grey-green, like a corpse barely bled out in the Arabian desert.  
  
She called herself Asra, but laughed faintly when she said it.  
  
Despite her size and physical lack of development, she was decidedly not a child. Her eyes were a deep bistre—indeed, deep enough that apparently once Descoteaux met them he fell into them and never came back. By the time Vincent rose in rank enough to meet Descoteaux, it was obvious Asra was speaking through him, using him to direct Tangier's trade toward heroin and other opiates. She sat behind him bathed in shadow with glinting eyes while Descoteaux explained the best way to move product. But as he watched her, it became apparent that those eyes never blinked, not even once. It was disconcerting.  
  
Before he left, he asked Descoteaux why he dealt in heroin when hashish was much easier to move in the area.  
  
"Tch, hashish is old news. What does hashish do for us? No, the true money lies in heroin for those who can sell it. And I, I can sell it." Spoken like one born only to wealth. His jowls quivered as he laughed heartily, djellaba half open to reveal graying chest hair.  
  
"This city is not near the traditional trade routes. Why not go somewhere more convenient?"  
  
Asra's eyes flashed a moment before Descoteaux hissed, "What do you care, pissant? You are here because I need you. If you do not want money you can work for someone else. Now cease your prattling and leave me."  
  
Vincent went.  
  
Later, in the hot dark room he let above a roach-infested cafe, he woke to an eerie melody and a tiny flickering shadow. The shadow faded and the melody whispered, "You ask too many questions, man of secrets."  
  
He glimpsed something tiny and sharp and grey, and then there were two lances of agony in his throat, accompanied by a grinding, sucking feeling and grips like two bear traps at his shoulder and the back of his head. He tried to scream, to struggle, but his limbs were lethargic now and only hissing breath left his lips.  
  
It was strange, this helplessness. He could feel his body shutting down, letting go of his consciousness, pulse fluttering at wrists and neck like a trapped bird. She was freeing it from this fleshy cage, allowing it to flee and fly into her, where she would let it run and curl and dance wildly...  
  
Minutes passed, years passed, spirit casting him off like a shed skin for her untamable glory, and then suddenly the grips were gone, and his body was lowered to the floor. He felt light and empty, as if he could float freely into the sky to become a star. He could hear something raggedly expel air and force it back in, a bellows pierced with too many holes, something dying... _My breath,_ he thought. _Ah, of course, I'm dying._ He tried to get his hands under himself, to put himself upright, but his fingers scrabbled uselessly on the battered wood, and his muscles trembled and shook like gelatin.  
  
The shadow was back, and this time he could make out a slightly lighter heart shape with two black holes for eyes and a petite, blood flecked mouth. It was almost angelic, in a way. She was showing him death's door. He only needed to walk through it.  
  
The mouth disappeared for a second, and then something wet dripped onto his face. He guided his tongue to his lips, feeling the wetness spread over it like a balm. He was so thirsty, all he needed was this one drink and then he could walk through that door...  
  
She pressed her wrist closer to his mouth, and he took it tenderly, kissed the wound like the only lover he would ever need, carried the cool wetness over his tongue and down his aching throat. It was bitter, yes, but also musky and with an aftertaste of striking nostalgia. Like tasting years wasted, choices not taken—  
  
Her wrist was wrenched from his grip, and when he tried to follow it she placed iron fingers on his lips. "That is enough," she whispered. And then she was gone.  
  
He fell into a sleep more like an endless void than a dream; he thought he could hear whispers in a language long dead, drifting there, but when he tried to focus on them they vanished. It was the most complete rest he had ever had.

* * *

The steel door creaked, and Vincent stiffened against the saltire. His back and shoulders were on fire and he could no longer feel his hands, the rest of his arms tingling in varying states of pins and needles. His teeth hung heavy in his mouth, fangs pressing insistently against lips cracked with thirst and bitten raw.  
  
"You must be wondering whether there is anything you can do to ease your suffering," Ravenscroft said, expanding a folded chair and sitting about three feet from Vincent. "Something you can tell me that will make me let you go."  
  
Vincent started to speak but the words stuck in his throat and he coughed, trying to clear it. "I know how you operate," he tried again, haltingly. "Once you have your eye on someone, it doesn't matter what they do. You enjoy it, and it's not going to stop until you're done." Sadists were all alike that way. Ravenscroft was just smarter about it than the average psychopath.  
  
Ravenscroft smiled genuinely. "I'm glad you understand," he said. "Now, tell me about yourself. The story of how you became a vampire must be fascinating."  
  
Vincent laughed, but it quickly turned to harsh coughing. He spat a small, amorphous black mass to the side. "I wouldn't even be here if you didn't already know all there is to know about me. Even the things I wish I didn't know. And as for that story, haven’t you already heard it? Asra must have given you the report."  
  
"It means more coming from you."  
  
"I didn't think you offered victims therapy as well."  
  
"Is it therapy you need?" Ravenscroft said blandly. He still held a faint glimmer of smile about his face. He gave no indication of offense, though Vincent was certain it was there. "I'm sure I could assist."  
  
Vincent met Ravenscroft's eyes, sinister and icy and opaque, but he quickly looked away. He shuddered, and his fangs began to throb steadily, dull aches making waves in his skull. He took a deep breath to focus, and exhaled.  
  
"Six years ago..."

* * *

He woke twelve hours after Asra's visit to the smell of burning hair and flesh, when a golden sliver of sunlight poured through the crack in his curtains to land on his arm. For the first second he couldn't understand what the tingling sensation was, until the next second brought with it a stab of pain and his skin began to smoke. He jerked into the corner of his bed, well away from the sun.  
  
His mind was hazy, still half in dreams, but he remembered asking discourteous questions of Descoteaux and then... And then he came home, and slept. And a shadow came to visit him, to quiet him, but it left him alive. The feeling of something dark and deep and earthy sliding down his throat...  
  
He bolted upright and into the bathroom. There, in a dirty, cracked mirror, he could see two reddened, gaping holes on the side of his neck. Most of his throat was bruised and purple, but something—Something else...  
  
His skin was chalky, too light. Not just pallid from sitting indoors most of his life, but paler, slightly grey, like a corpse. Bloodless. Bruised-looking bags hung low under sunken and red-rimmed eyes. He took a sharp breath and pulled his lips from his teeth.  
  
Two dirty white fangs peered out from where his canines had been.  
  
It was then that he realized he was famished, although this feeling was odd. Thirst and hunger entwined; like craving a cigarette and food at the same time, unable to discern which one you wanted. But, also deeper, as though there was something... A hole, vast and empty, waiting to be filled.  
  
In the pantry he procured a slice of bread, the blandest food he had, a stomach filler. He could only eat one slice, the sticky masses of grain sliding slowly down his throat. He gagged, but managed to keep it down. It left his tongue feeling hairy and grotesque, his throat parched.  
  
Water. Water was simple, tasteless. But in one mouthful it was as though he could taste all the sewage the water had touched, no matter how it had been cleansed. Now he could barely swallow.  
  
At first, it seemed to work. He felt less empty. But within twenty minutes, huddled in the corner of his apartment trying to quell a growing panic, his stomach began to twist. He stumbled to the bathroom, until with a sharp pain and a cloud of nausea he was on his knees vomiting black bile into the toilet.  
  
When he was done, he wiped his mouth with a tissue and thought: _More rest. Impossible things happen to the body because of stress, that must be it, and if I sleep more I will feel better._ He climbed into bed, huddled beneath the blankets in the corner. Eventually he managed to fall asleep.  
  
Six hours later, his eyes sprang open and his consciousness was forced into alertness. Now the feeling was no longer thirst or hunger. It was a deep, pulsating need from the core of his being. Beneath his skin it felt as though beetles rustled quickly over his muscles, carrying the need from his guts to his fingers. He held his hand out in front of him, and it trembled.  
  
He pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes, bringing forth colour out of the darkness behind his lids. His teeth had begun to throb in time with his heartbeat, quickly now as he recognized the danger.  
  
_No,_ he thought. _No, no, no. This can't be happening. I am not a vampire. That's not what this is!_  
  
But it was.  
  
In the kitchen, he grabbed the sharpest knife he had, a paring knife, short and curved. If its handle weren't plastic, it might have looked wicked. He dragged the edge across the back of his left hand, and tentatively stuck out his tongue to the blood welling from it.  
  
It was sweet, so sweet. But it tasted empty; it did not quell the need within him. Within minutes the cut had sealed already, new skin indistinguishable from the old. He heard a strangled noise, almost a sob, and he realized it had come from his mouth. He knew what he needed to do.  
  
Outside the cafe a small Berber boy sold olives and sometimes dates from a basket at night. He was there every evening by six o'clock, and only spoke to haggle with customers. Once or twice Vincent had bought some dates, but the boy charged rather more than Vincent could afford for fruits.  
  
He was there again today, sitting and swinging thin legs as an elderly man tried to haggle fifty fat green olives from two dirhams down to one. The boy refused, and the elderly man grudgingly traded him the money for the bag and ambled away.  
  
"Hello," Vincent said hesitantly. The boy simply watched him.  
  
No dates today. Only scores of black and green olives, moonlight glinting from their juicy skin. The sour smell would start to nauseate him if he stayed too long. "Ah... Ten of the black, please..." he said, handing over a twenty santimat piece. The boy took it and handed him a small bag silently. He stood there, awkwardly, hands shaking in his pockets as he tried to think of a way to coax the boy from his perch and into the alley.  
  
"You want the other?" the boy said. Vincent's eyebrows knitted in confusion. The boy made an obscene gesture. "The other. I don't do it, but I can take you to someone who does."  
  
Vincent sighed, rubbed his face, tried to stop the shaking in his hands. "Yes, thank you."  
  
The boy hopped down, looked back at him dispassionately. "You don't look so well. Maybe you want to see a doctor." He started across the courtyard to the narrow street that led to the merchants district, and Vincent followed. _I wish I could,_ Vincent thought.  
  
The boy knocked on the first floor door to what appeared to be a small unassuming brothel, painted a faded purple. Twice, once, three times. Before long a woman in her forties opened the door.  
  
"Says he wants a partner for the night, miss," the boy explained.

"Thank you, Ibrahim," she said. "I will take it from here." The boy scampered off, leaving Vincent with what must have been the proprietor of the place. "Come in, sir," she said, stepping aside, and he offered her a shaky smile.  
  
"Do you prefer men or women?" she asked him as they walked up the stairs to the main level. His voice balked at the unexpected question, several seconds passing until she glanced back at him with mild concern. "I, ah—I like men," he said finally. She nodded, almost to herself.  
  
On the main level, there was a lounge area in which patrons and workers of varying gender, age, race, and upbringing mingled. In one corner a curvy Berber woman in vibrantly orange lingerie was giving an older American man a lap dance. A lean young French boy sat on the couch fingering the glass of a Moroccan man's drink, his legs thrown over the man's lap. It was certainly a brothel, but it seemed to have no unifying theme.  
  
They then walked through a curtain and down a hall that could have been outside any flat in any working class neighbourhood in Europe. Shabby, threadbare green carpet, vaguely taupe-white walls, brown paint chipping off of each door. She stopped at room five, a dull brass number hanging crookedly on the door. She knocked twice, and left him.  
  
The occupant ended up being a young Moroccan man of about twenty who Vincent thought had the look of a student. His face was homely but not unattractive, with wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, and his smile had a twist of sad desperation to it. He was wearing a beige satin bathrobe and a pair of tight blue jeans that revealed the lean body of a swimmer or runner.  
  
"Good evening," the young man said, and Vincent coughed lightly and offered his hand. He had never actually been to a brothel, and certainly didn't expect such a... normal-looking place, nor anyone who wasn't trying to actively seduce him. "Hello, I'm Vincent," he said. The young man's mouth quirked up in a slight smile and he shook Vincent's hand.  
  
"Yusuf," he said. "Would you like some tea? I was just making some. And please, sit."  
  
"Sure... Thanks," Vincent said.  
  
"Is it your first time?" Yusuf asked, not unkindly. "You seem very nervous, and I can't say I've seen you before." Vincent had sat down in a chair next to the door, hands clasped tightly together to stop them shaking, and removed his shoes. His right leg bobbed up and down quickly.  
  
Vincent closed his eyes, counted to ten, and took a deep breath. When he opened them, there was a small glass of mint tea on the table, and Yusuf had perched on the bed, waiting for him to say something.  
  
"Y-yes, I'm sorry. I have high anxiety, and it flares up at the worst times..."  
  
_Remember why you are here,_ he told himself. And yet, it was that thought that made him shake. He steeled himself, and went and sat next to Yusuf. The lines of their bodies meshed together, warmth spreading from Yusuf's lithe frame. Vincent gently took the glasses from Yusuf's face and set them on the dresser just before the bed. He ran a hand cautiously through Yusuf's curly hair, miraculously without a tremor, and leaned in for a kiss.  
  
Yusuf's lips were soft and hot, and Vincent could only imagine the coarseness of his lips dragging over them, the ragged feeling like sandpaper. He wished he could do better for Yusuf, but now it was too late.  
  
Yusuf's fingers danced over his shirt buttons, undoing them with one hand as they kissed, finally pulling the shirt out and away from Vincent's back. Vincent let his arms hang and the shirt slid off and onto the floor. He felt an erection begin forming against his trousers, and Yusuf moved to unzip him, breaking the kiss.  
  
With more grace than Vincent thought was possible, Yusuf peeled Vincent's pants and trousers from his legs and tossed them onto the chair, sliding out of the satin robe. He too was hardening, getting more and more defined through the dark denim. Vincent moved then to Yusuf's jeans and, with rather less finesse, removed them. Vincent pushed Yusuf lightly back onto the bed, onto his back, and began kissing him again with renewed fervor, his erection growing. Yusuf made a motion to caress it, but Vincent pinned his hand to the side and began to kiss a trail down slowly over his cheek, his jaw, his throat.  
  
Guilt and hunger intertwined readily with desire, and Vincent could no longer pull away from what he had set in motion. The steady rhythm and heady scent of the blood just beneath Yusuf's throat was mesmerizing. He had never experienced anything like it; like the anticipation of a steak at a four-star restaurant, the caress of one’s beloved, and the promise of a great wish just a word away from coming true, all at once...  
  
He licked the great jumping pulse of the carotid artery, savouring the moment, and then bit sharply down.  
  
He distantly heard Yusuf cry out as blood spurted into his mouth, around his lips, too fast for him to catch it all in his excitement. He crushed himself against the struggling boy, sucking and biting desperately, savaging Yusuf's throat with his zeal.  
  
The blood was as thick and bitter as it had been from Asra, but now it held the softest sweetest taste as he swallowed, a promise of potential. It burned as it entered him, every place it touched cleansed and ablaze. No longer did his limbs tremble, but he felt as though he could topple heroes and crush gods. Lightning arced through his veins now, and when it reached his swollen, painful erection he felt his mind white out and shatter with bliss.  
  
When he came to, he realized he was curled around Yusuf's stained, sad corpse, awash in a mixture of blood and semen. His fingers tingled slightly, as though they could shoot tiny sparks. His vision felt clearer, sharper; his body lighter and faster. In the mirror over the dresser his reflection, while ghoulish, looked healthier. Veins no longer crawled across his face, though he was still as pale and dishevelled as before, and while there were deep shadows under his eyes they were no longer bags.  
  
He jerked, remembering where he was. People would come here, they would see the carnage and arrest him, or even kill him. Casting about frantically for something to wash his face with, he realized that there was another door in the far corner. Of course, the workers lived here. He scrambled for the bathroom.  
  
He managed to find and wet a towel, scrubbing fiercely at his face and hands and neck. He could deal with the rest later, if only he could get out of this place. Once suitably clean, he dressed quickly and cast a mournful look at the body that was once Yusuf, before opening the door.

* * *

It appeared Ravenscroft was taking a hands-off approach to torturing Vincent, letting only Vincent's vampiric urges destroy him. It was day three now, and Vincent's vision had begun to splinter at the edges. He slumped against the bonds of the standing cross, weak, most feeling lost.

He had managed to drowse a few hours ago, only to wake up to a shooting pain in his abdomen and then an insistent, immediate nausea. He had tried to vomit as far from his position as possible, but it was sadly not far enough. What came out looked like blackened coffee grounds; the blood in his system literally curdling. His body was breaking down.  
  
He thought about telling Ravenscroft, but it wasn't likely to make a difference, and it would be obvious once he walked into the room. Pain like a poison-tipped iron maiden had rusted shut over his skull, the most vicious headache he had ever had. Every so often tiny darts of it erupted in random places; arms, feet, lower back. Anywhere.

It occurred to him that he didn't know what happened to vampires after this point. He hadn't sought any of them out since he had been turned, and had never run into one by accident. Even the lore he had read was inconclusive; some texts said that without blood a vampire could simply desiccate into a state of waking paralysis, and that this had been used to punish the unworthy or the dangerously insane. He imagined it wasn't as effective at keeping them in line as the text implied; after all, even someone who had entered a coffin sane wouldn't spend a hundred years motionless in darkness and come out the same way.  
  
Other texts spoke of revenants; vampires actively driven insane by their bloodlust, becoming mindless, ravenous ghouls that devoured any flesh they came across, living or dead. It was unclear how much consciousness was left in such creatures, but it didn't matter. He hoped Ravenscroft would offer enough mercy to kill him instead.  
  
Speaking of the devil, he heard footsteps outside, and a moment later the man himself strode in and filled his chair. “Dear Vincent, you look ill," he said companionably, as if he weren’t directly responsible. The rank smell of old blood stained the air, but that didn’t seem to bother him.  
  
Vincent only peered at him distantly through his bangs. He was tired, too tired for these games. Just below his throat he could feel his organs roiling and churning, a big black void of hunger grinding them into paste. The splinters in his vision began to vibrate and he closed his eyes.  
  
From across a great chasm, he heard Ravenscroft say, "No heart for it today, I see." He seemed strangely pleased this visit. Something good must have happened outside. Good for Ravenscroft, of course, not for anyone else... He couldn't bring himself to care, trying to stay afloat in a scarlet sea of pain.  
  
"I met your strapping operative friend today, what was his name… Christian, Kieran..." the voice said, and it took a moment for Vincent to process. His eyes snapped open, swinging wildly until they locked onto Ravenscroft's infinitesimal smirk. He opened his mouth but all that came out was a soft croak. He tried again.  
  
"Tell me... you... didn't..." but he couldn't finish the sentence. His eyes burned, vision shattering into kaleidoscopic fragments of that hateful face. He tried to concentrate, a furrow forming between his eyebrows, sweat starting to bead on his forehead, but the images would not resolve.  
  
Ravenscroft sighed, the perfect picture of wounded dignity. "I did not. He is much more useful to me alive... Just like you." He spread his hands. _Look how much I've done for you._  
  
Before he could stop it, an almost inaudible laugh escaped Vincent's lips. _You call this alive? At least in death I could sleep._

Ravenscroft snapped his fingers. “Ah! Cameron, that was it. He seems to be doing well, actually," he said, pulling a simple folding knife from his pocket and unfolding it with a click. Vincent watched him dully. _So much for hands-off. I guess it's time for the real excitement._ Finally, blessedly, the kaleidoscope blended back into one picture.  
  
"I think you should introduce us," Ravenscroft said, and sliced into his palm.  
  
Blood slid down the blade, dripped from his hand onto the cement, drew Vincent's eyes to it like a lightning rod. Everything went static, except for the sight, the smell, the sound of the blood slowly forming a puddle on the floor. Dimly it registered that his mouth was slightly open, as if he could taste it from there. He shut it.  
  
Ravenscroft stepped forward, just out of Vincent's short reach. He might have asked a question, but all he received was a strangled, frustrated noise. Vincent's wide eyes were still fixed on the blood. Closer, the voice cut through his reverie like an axe, leaving no room for doubt.

"Did you fantasize about killing him?" Ravenscroft said.

Another raw sound, torn from Vincent's throat. He tried to shut his eyes, but they just sprang open again, searching for the source, wide and desperate. Ravenscroft came close and cupped Vincent’s face in his bloody left hand, thumb barely brushing his lips. If it hadn't been Ravenscroft, it might have even been tender. "Did you?" he asked softly.  
  
"I... don't..." He began, but something deep in the back of his mind snapped. He couldn’t help but tell the truth here; felt a resonance between Ravenscroft and himself. Despite his mind’s weak protests he found his mouth forming the answer.

"Y... yes..." he breathed. Ravenscroft smiled, genuinely pleased now, and patted him on the cheek. "I thought so," he said, moving back and leaving bright handprints of blood on the side of Vincent's face.  As if waking from a dream, Vincent shuddered violently. He _needed_ what Ravenscroft had offered, his body demanded it—

"N… No! You can't... can't leave it... like..."  
  
He thought he saw a strange contraction of the space around Ravenscroft's hand, like the view through a glass of water, but then it was gone, and Ravenscroft was walking through the door.

 

 

* * *

The tingling in his fingers had now elevated to an insatiable itch. His fingernails had each cracked through the middle, and were now dull grey and flaking. On the way back he had clenched them tightly in his pockets, resisting the urge to pick at them. But now, back to safety in his little flat and no longer with a destination, he felt like a glass too full of liquid, surface trembling, about to spill over at any second.

Thinking about Yusuf, he was filled with contradictory feelings. He could not think of an action more exhilarating than killing someone, and though he was filled with guilt he was not suffocated by it. In fact, since Asra had visited him it seemed every emotion was both heightened and muted in equal measure—truly, a paradoxical existence.  
  
At the thought of killing Yusuf, his fingers spasmed, nail beds screaming. He wondered why he was fighting against this. Why shouldn't he just let go, scratch his fingers along the thin carpet here, alleviate this wretched annoyance?  
  
He uncurled his hands from his chest and set them on the carpet like a cat. He dragged the nails against the grain, hard, feeling the old and worn proteins peel away. It felt awful, but also reassuring... Peeling the dry scab away from new flesh, allowing himself to break free of the constrictions. Shedding the old form for the new.  
  
Now there was a pile of white and grey skin and pieces of old nails. Finally, they were free. Looking at his hands, flexing them, he could unsheathe new claws, sharper than bone, tougher than diamonds. His fingers ended in strange grooves now, nothing like human fingernails. More like a cat's.  
  
He would need to get a pair of gloves for the future.

* * *

He had to get out of Tangier, he couldn't stay there anymore, but there was one last thing he could do for the city. Even if Asra was out of his league, he could destroy Descoteaux.  
  
It was now eleven in the evening, and even the night markets had retired. Descoteaux lived on the northern edge of the medina, in a large riad that he had bought out and renovated himself before it could become a hotel. A soft warm breeze came in from the port, faintly salty, sending strands of Vincent's hair astray. He was almost there; he could see the door about ten meters down the Rue Bouhachem, dark against the white of the building. He stuck a hand in his pocket, feeling for his knife and the lighter he had bought at a street vendor on the way. He took it out and tested it, and at first click a flame blossomed merrily. He snuffed it and put it back in his pocket.  
  
He expected the vague sounds of men up late indulging themselves, but he did not expect to reach the door just as one of them stumbled out of it. The man had the smell of hashish hanging over him, the glazed eyes and vague smile of someone for whom time was passing differently. There was a bulge at his side where a sidearm lurked, revealed by an ill-tailored suit.  
  
Vincent grabbed the man before he could lurch away, arm around his throat, halting the blood flow to his head. Within fifteen seconds the man was unconscious, and Vincent let him slump to the ground, taking the gun on his way down. He emptied the bullets into his pockets and then threw the gun into the bushes, moving quietly through the open door.  
  
As soon as he crossed the threshold, something strange happened. A prickling wave like a thousand tiny thorns bloomed under his skin, and with each step he took the thorns lengthened. Now his muscles were on fire, and wetness dripped down his face and neck. When he touched it his fingers came away red. He backtracked to the entrance, fascinated, and stepping over the threshold again the pain faded and he stopped bleeding.  
  
"You have to be invited in, of course," a silky whisper said. Asra materialized like a ghost from the shadows beside the house. "Little mouse."  
  
"Is that what I am?" he said. "Only as much as you made me, I suppose."  
  
She walked lightly, graceful and poised like a dancer, making her seem ethereal and otherworldly. Her mien was assuredly not that of a child. "How old are you?" he asked, less interested in banter than in information. "Why come here to sell heroin if you have this kind of power? It seems... unworthy."  
  
She stopped, tilted her head the tiniest fraction. "I was sent here, just like you were. My employer requested this of me, and I obliged him."  
  
"If you wanted to kill me anyway, why change me? What do you get out of it?"  
  
She blinked. "I was... intrigued. I wanted to know what would happen." It seemed she had never made another vampire before, as unlikely as that sounded. "And I do not want to kill you," she said. "You still interest me. For example, I wonder what you will do now...?" And she faded back into the shadows as if she were smoke.  
  
She was lying about why she changed him, but for what reason he couldn't say. He considered his next move. At the center of the riad was a courtyard, and he could still hear people awake inside. It was time to test the boundaries of the invitation and of his vampire strength. Asra had to know he was here to kill Descoteaux, but she had also assured him she didn't want him dead.

He began climbing.  
  
The riad's roof was actually part roof and part terrace. He stayed on the roof side, hoping that the invitation rule only applied to rooms, places where people were meant to be. So far, it seemed true. He found the courtyard's skylight open to the sky, unbound by glass or metal. Three stories below him was a fountain, burbling pleasantly, and the sound of voices. He mentally crossed his fingers, and jumped down.  
  
He landed beside the fountain, catlike, a firm tremor running not unpleasantly through his body. The voices stopped abruptly, and he straightened. "Gentlemen," he said. The three men glanced at each other through a fog of hashish, as if to say "You seeing this?"  
  
"Invite me in," he said. He assumed they lived there, being here so late. He hoped it was so. They nodded, looking very afraid, and he remembered that he must appear a demon, blood drying on his face. "You have to say it," he clarified.  
  
One of them haltingly said, "C-come... in."  
  
Beating them unconscious was almost unfair, it was so easy.

He tossed their sidearms into the fountain and then listened, but could hear nothing but the water. All of the rooms in the riad opened to the courtyard, even those on the upper levels. He didn't really want to search the entire palatial building, but... There. A whiff of something. Orange blossom and... amber.  
  
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The scent was coming from the second floor, towards the northern end of the house. The staircase would be at the front of the house, the southern end. He stepped around the bodies, towards the light of the lobby.  
  
The riad was more tasteful than Vincent remembered, suffused with soft golden light provided by filigree lanterns hanging on the side of the staircase and from the ceiling. Plush rugs lined the tiled floor, each worth more than he made in a year. He took the stairs softly two at a time and stopped again at the top, listening. Now he could hear faint snoring, from the northern side, furthest from the stairs. He continued on.  
  
The door was unlocked, but closed, so the latch clicked softly when it opened. Descoteaux's room was redolent of orange and amber, the air so thick you could practically carve it. It made Vincent's nose itch so strongly that he sneezed twice in quick succession. Just as he was lamenting his ill luck, a deep voice heavy with sleep demanded, "Who is that?"  
  
He leapt onto Descoteaux's bed and Descoteaux opened his mouth to yell, but all that escaped his throat was a hideous gurgle as Vincent sawed it open with his folding knife. He fumbled for the lighter in his pocket, ignited Descoteaux's still-twitching corpse via his pyjamas, and exited the room.  
  
He ascended to the terrace and roof. The riad was about on level with the buildings beside it, and everything in the medina was built closely together, so he hopped rooftops until he was almost to the cafe. Finally, he dropped down into the street and went up to his dingy flat.  
  
Mostly what he owned were clothes, and not even many of those. He stuffed them haphazardly into a large duffel bag, along with his wallet and a pair of plastic sunglasses, and grabbed the mobile out of his coat pocket. He dialed 190.  
  
"Yes, hello? There appears to be smoke coming from the house across from mine." He gave them the address of Descoteaux's riad and hung up. From his small window he could see smoke rising in the distance.  
  
He shouldered his bag, letting the door close behind him with a click.

* * *

Ravenscroft sat down leisurely in his folding chair, not three feet from Vincent. It had been almost fourteen hours since Vincent had moved, and Ravenscroft thought it was time. The catatonic phase of vampire starvation was the last; now he would either go mad or beg for death.  
  
He waited patiently.  
  
Vincent's bloodshot eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking, his pupils narrow slits. They were no longer chestnut brown; now, with the veil of his humanity peeled away, they were the color of old gold, lined with thick borders of bright blood. His black hair clumped around his shoulders in greasy tangles, what used to be bangs now limply shaded his face in thick strands. Tiny purple veins threaded through his face, collecting around his eyes in deep bruises, and there were remnants of black bile on his lips and chin. Crimson handprints had dried to brown on the right side of his face.  
  
The manacles had worn his wrists raw, and Ravenscroft could see clear fluid weeping slightly from under the metal. Dust and dirt had wormed into Vincent’s skin, splotching it with grey regardless of proximity to the floor, the cross, and spidery veins wound their way up his arms and down his torso in shades of purple and blue.  
  
After about an hour, finally bored of admiring Vincent's disheveled state, he took out his knife and unfolded it, dragging the blade down the side of his wrist.  
  
Almost immediately the bonds creaked, and Vincent bared dirty-white fangs. A strange, almost inaudible keening came from his throat, like the whining of a dog, which pleased Ravenscroft. This was good; he was very close. He got up and moved right, then left, testing it. Vincent's head turned to follow Ravenscroft's motions, but his eyes did not track. He was functioning on smell alone.  
  
He had almost reached the door when the keening stopped, and there was an organic click, like a dry swallow. Then, a whisper.  
  
"P... lease..." Another click. "Kill..."  
  
Ah, there. Now they were ready.  
  
Ravenscroft left.

* * *

Seeing the damage left at Descoteaux’s riad and finding Vincent’s shabby sublet emptied, Asra sought him at the marina, as he waited for the last ferry to Tarifa. She was dressed in a black gingham dress and white slippers, and looked for all the world like any of the Moroccan children that might have accompanied a parent to Spain.  
  
"What I don't understand," he said softly, by way of greeting, "is that my mission here was not to kill him. Not even close. I was ordered into cover, instructed to stay and obtain any and all information on the heroin trade he was setting up, indefinitely." He turned to her. "But that didn't happen."  
  
She had the grace to look away, but otherwise she was unreadable. "I needed him out of the way. He was the wrong one for the task, but... I was not permitted to interfere with it. I was told to direct, to manipulate, to observe, but to make no attempts on his life." She sighed, and in a small voice she confessed, "Also, I... I wanted revenge. But of course, that was out of the question.  
  
"So I needed someone to do it for me. I could smell the distaste you had for him, his work. And most importantly, you wanted to do it. It was against your orders, but you still wanted to. I simply gave you a push into acting on that desire."  
  
"Yes. But I could have done all of this without becoming a vampire," he said, without emotion.  
  
"I had no intention of taking you under my wing," she said, sidestepping the question, "and you are strong enough to live without that. Most of us die within days, but you were different. You wanted to live, even if it meant suffering."  
  
He laughed at that.  
  
She stood up, dress billowing in the breeze. "Goodbye, Vincent," she said.  
  
He watched her go until she was a tiny dot lost in the distance. He had been manipulated, but to what end?

* * *

Ravenscroft injected Vincent’s motionless form with a sedative. He waited fifteen minutes, past the point at which Vincent’s eyelids drooped shut and he relaxed against the cross, and then unlocked the manacles from his wrists. He left him crumpled on the floor and

left to escort in an unarmoured soldier, pimply faced and fresh from training, who took up a post in the corner.  
  
Leaving to watch the camera feed, Ravenscroft mused over the choice of victim. He had little taste for sending useful people to die, though he acknowledged that at times it couldn't be helped. But this one, a shiny new penny of a soldier, this one he could afford to lose. Nurses, doctors, scientists; those he needed. But there were always more people who could handle a weapon.  
  
The sedative wore off in what would have been record time, had Vincent been human. As it was, the soldier waited only ten minutes standing stiffly at attention. He had been told this was a training exercise for his new post; that they were going to give him a drug that would impede his reaction times, and mark how well he did. It would be as if he were under pressure in the real world, but in a way that could be measured. They smiled and gave him a needle in the shoulder and told him it was fine. Fresh from training, stripped of personality and remade as a small cog in a very large machine, he believed them.  
  
They lied, of course.  
  
The crumpled, sickly body in the corner twitched, levered itself onto its hands. It shuddered and vomited black liquid onto the concrete, at which point the guard's eyes widened and he began to sweat. That wasn't normal, people didn't— People didn't do that— Did they?  
  
It tried to rise, stiffly, as though it had forgotten how to stand. It—no, he, he was a man, wasn't he? Man-shaped, at least—he raised his shaggy head and the guard could see his face clearly now. There was something wrong with his eyes, he thought, and then realized... They had almost completely rolled back into his head.  
  
He took a step, and another, and the guard's sweat turned cold. There was something... Wrong, with the man's movements. They were alien, slightly jerky, like a film played backwards. The mouth, still spotted with black bile, opened slightly; enough for the guard to see fangs glistening there. _No_ , he thought, _no post is worth this, they can court-martial me, I don't care._ He stepped slowly, carefully to the door.  
  
It was too late.  
  
The monster was there before he could pound on the door, lips pulled up in a smile that was more like a shark's expression than a man's. A bony hand with an iron grip grasped his shoulder and threw him into the opposite wall, where he heard his own skull crack. Vision swimming, he tried to stand, but it was already there with its death's-head grin. Sharp fingers sank into his abdomen, shredding it as it pulled him back up to eye level. Blood oozed hotly from the wound, and he was close enough to the monster's face to see its nostrils flare.  
  
It bit down savagely on the guard's throat, tearing it out and letting the blood shower it in red. It fastened onto the font, gulping it down, tearing and swallowing small chunks of flesh in its haste, the struggles of the dying thing under it adding spice to its meal. It crushed the body against its own, sucking fervently at the slowing blood, until the struggles stopped. Only then did it let the shell fall to the floor. It turned, head tilted, face coming to rest on the tiny camera in the corner of the ceiling.  
  
Blank eyes met Ravenscroft's and he frowned, about to head down to confront him directly, when what he had been waiting for finally happened. Vincent sank to his knees, then to the floor, eyes rolling slowly forward to their proper place. His pupils were so large now that his eyes were almost black. The blood high after so long might have been enough to contain him, but there was no guarantee. Instead, they used both, injecting an additional sedative into the victim to confirm a pliant state.

This time he chained him up in five minutes.

* * *

Vincent knew he was awake. He knew this because he rarely remembered his dreams, even ones as strange as this, and even in the dreams he could remember, he could never feel. They were always like watching films of himself.  
  
His body was heavy, skin tingling all over not unpleasantly. He tried to move his arms but couldn't tell if the command had actually reached them, feeling only a heavy wave towards the top of his body. In fact, everything he could feel was slow and warm, and nothing made sense. His ears felt as though someone had wrapped them in thick fur, and his vision was all wavy blurs of beige and grey and deep pink. As if from miles away, his groin throbbed with a heavy erection.  
  
There was a scent and taste mixing in the back of his throat, and he realized that he was no longer in pain. It was... refreshing, but strange. He set that thought aside, let it drift past him. _Don't think about it. It doesn't mean anything._ Slowly it dawned on him what the taste was.  
  
Blood. Hot, thick blood straight from an artery, bitter and euphoric, skin piercing flesh tearing red showering—  
  
_No, stop._ He disentangled himself from that thought too. Let it go. Gradually he became aware of a separate stripe of soft tingling, lazily tracing up and down his side. He twisted to see before he realized that everything just blurred into stripes and he gave up, relaxing again. Shortly it returned, running up and down his ribs, then caressing lower, lower...  
  
"Cameron?" he said, but the word was quickly swallowed by the blurs of grey. He tried to concentrate on the touch, to see the perpetrator, but the harder he tried the more it eluded him. He couldn't tell if he was standing or sitting. Everything was a haze.  
  
A firm grip encircled his penis, and just that touch made him shudder in ecstasy. The grip loosened and a smooth palm barely grazed the head, eliciting a soft, startled cry between pleasure and frustration as he arched into it. The hand closed around his shaft again and began tugging rhythmically up and down, bright white waves of pleasure rolling over Vincent's body.  
  
His pulse quickened, involuntary moans escaping his lips, and as the white wave crashed over him a cutting crescent came with it, and he climaxed in an incandescent fury of pleasure and pain.

* * *

Stepping foot in the SIS building after so long abroad was strange; part coming home, part beginning a new school term. Reassuring yet foreboding. Even stranger was walking in after dark.  
  
He was directed to wait in the fifth floor conference room, and it was not long before his section chief strode in.  
  
"So, MacLachlan," she began. Her name was Nalini Choudhuri, a grim, no-nonsense Indian woman in her mid-fifties who had been with Vincent’s section for just over a year. "Do you want to explain why our mark in Tangier turned up dead two days ago?"  
  
"Because I killed him," he said, pushing up his cheap plastic sunglasses. Her eyes narrowed a fraction, frown deepening, waiting for him to elaborate. When he didn't, she snapped, "Yes, we know you killed him. The question is why. You were supposed to watch him, learn from him."  
  
"There were... complications," he said. He folded his sunglasses and set them on the conference table, revealing bruised and sunken brown eyes. He shrugged out of his suit jacket, tossing it onto the table, and started rolling up his left sleeve.  
  
Before Choudhuri could prompt him to continue, he hooked one newly-lengthened claw in the hollow of his wrist and dragged down. Blood flooded the six-inch gash and dripped to the carpet, and Choudhuri’s eyes widened despite her stony expression. But the cut wasn't the real show. Instead, after a couple of seconds of uncertain anticipation, the wound began to knit closed. It wasn't healing; there was no scabbing over, no crusty brown residue, no shiny, reddened new skin. It was more like watching a video rewind, skin flowing together like water, without a mark left over. Only blood, quickly drying in the open air.  
  
"You want to tell me why you came back, if this—," she waved frustratedly in his direction, "—fuckery damaged you so much?" He admired that even through her confusion, she wasn't trying to pretend that she didn't just see something impossible.  
  
"I have a job to do," he said. "I want to keep doing it. But this time I want to go after the perpetrator directly."  
  
Choudhuri was silent for a good five minutes, calculating, but Vincent didn't mind. While reassignments weren't uncommon, it was unheard of to be this direct in asking for one, regardless of circumstances.

Finally, she sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you. Go home, sleep. I have to talk to my supervisor about this. I’ll call you before six tomorrow night.”

 

* * *

The next day he woke blearily to the chiming of his phone. “MacLachlan,” he said, voice still gritty with sleep.

It was Choudhuri. "All right. We can offer you a reassignment on a probational basis. I don't know what other mystifying tricks you have up your sleeve, but if this hunt goes wrong, it's going to be on you. If you fuck it up, don't expect support from us. As far as I'm concerned, you were officially killed in action in Tangier."  
  
"I accept," he said. And that was that.

* * *

Vincent avoided Cameron after coming home, convincing himself that Cameron would be better off without this new, unpredictable, dangerous Vincent in his life. It wasn't hard; Cameron lived half a city away from Vincent’s shabby rented room, and Vincent rarely ventured into Vauxhall for information he couldn't otherwise obtain.

Unfortunately, the universe had not relayed his intentions to Cameron.

A week after Vincent’s return, it was almost one in the morning, and a firm rain played pleasant music against his window. It had been almost three nights since he had last fed, but he was on a roll deciphering the puzzle that was his target. Every time he thought to take a break, he made more progress, and put it off again.

His room was a mess; paperwork and files everywhere, sticky notes all over the wall, and even a large map punctuated with push-pins. According to SIS intelligence, the perpetrator killed indiscriminately, with victims on four continents in fifteen different countries, aged five to ninety-five. It was unknown how many victims there were in total, but the offender seemed to amuse himself leaving one obvious body for every major city in Europe. He left them practically gift-wrapped, gruesome offerings, or perhaps taunts.

But of course, according the internet, he was a spectral celebrity, haunting users on message boards with his grisly output and deft avoidance of the law. People speculated endlessly on how he might manage to scatter bodies over the entire planet, but no one knew anything concrete.

The media tried to label him but all the names tended to fade as the trail ran cold. For Vincent, he was the jack-of-all-trades, or simply Jack.

He was about to call one of the operatives they had stationed in Moscow to see if he had heard anything about the most recent death, when his doorbell buzzed.

_Shit_ , he thought. He knew who it was, the only person it could be, but maybe if he willed it hard enough Cameron would go away.

A muffled voice came from outside the door. “I know you’re here. I showed the desk clerk your picture, said it was official business. He didn’t have the wits to refuse me.”

Vincent opened the door, dragging Cameron inside with a viselike grip. Fighting in the hallway would only lead to questions, and questions mostly led to being evicted. Possibly worse.

It took a second for Vincent to process his own movement, and then he jerked back, releasing Cameron’s arm as if it were a poisonous snake. His fingers flexed and released as though they wanted to return to that grasp.

Cameron eyed him disapprovingly. Vincent was all too aware of what a mess he was, disheveled, too pale, veins bruising around red-rimmed eyes, but he didn’t have time for distractions, not when he was close, so close to finding Jack—

Cameron brushed past him only to stop and marvel at the papers covering every surface. "I see you've been busy," Cameron said, caustic and tight.

"You shouldn’t be here," Vincent said, and couldn’t even look him in the eye. Cameron gaped, insult adding to his ire. As if he could leave now, as if Vincent wasn’t the one who dragged him inside the room.

“ _Excuse me?_ ” Cameron said, “You called me almost every day for six months while you were in Tangier and then—nothing, for days. I thought you were dead! I learned that you came back only because I overheard that bastard Eric in Div 23 gossiping about Choudhuri! But _now_ you have the balls to tell me I should go even after all we’ve been through?”

A thousand excuses flew through Vincent's mind, each flimsier than the last. He wanted to hide the truth from Cameron, but the signs were too numerous, and it was only a matter of time. Already, suspicion lurked behind those black eyes. He sighed. He had been so consumed with gathering information on Jack he hadn't even formed a plan. Or maybe he was fooling himself; maybe lying to Cameron just wasn't something he could do. Self-sabotage. It had been known to happen.

“Hello, MacLachlan?”

Cameron stepped forward, invading Vincent’s personal space, and a scent like hot brick and mint and sweat choked the air. It was cloying and dangerous and sat heavily over Vincent’s willpower, patiently crushing him. He realized what a stupid fucking move it was, letting Cameron into this tiny room. He wished he could take it back, wished he had thought this plan through to its inevitable end.

It was harder, so much harder like this, with Cameron. He should have never even come back—should have moved to a new city, a new country—

Cameron put a hand on his shoulder. “You could at least look me in the eye while you passive-aggressively break up with—”

Snapping, surging forward, Vincent clutched Cameron’s face and pressed greedy lips to his mouth. Startled, Cameron let his mouth gape and Vincent slid his tongue past teeth, licked inside his mouth and then withdrew. He pulled lightly at Cameron’s bottom lip with teeth, retraced the movement and bit down, dragging at it. Cameron jerked as fangs sank in, drawing blood.

“Ah, shit!” Cameron said, pulling back. “That never happened before!”

“That’s because I wasn’t a vampire before,” Vincent muttered. Even that small taste of Cameron’s blood was mesmerizing, a head of mint and vanilla and a finish like oak leaves and desert winds, and he shuddered. A small but insistent voice in the back of his mind whispered, _More, more._

Cameron worked his jaw, but no sound came out. Vincent cleared a path in the paperwork and made a place on a chair for Cameron to sit.

"Sit," he said, and Cameron did.

"I stayed away because I don't want to hurt you," Vincent confessed. He omitted that, in the heat of the moment, he would have enjoyed it. Shoved that thought down, buried it. "I care about you, but it's more important that you are safe, and being with me is very definitely _not safe_."

He left it there, let that sink in, and sorted his files out again. Not long after he began to read, Cameron found his voice.

“How in the _goddamn_ world did you get to be a vampire?” There was no fear in his voice, only awe and confusion.

Vincent scowled at him. “What is wrong with you? You should be terrified. I killed an innocent man in Tangier because I was hungry. I ripped out his throat and butchered him and I _enjoyed it!_ ”

He unsheathed his claws and dragged them across his forearm, holding it away from Cameron as he jumped to stem the blood flow. “The next time I feed, these wounds will close as if they were never there,” he said, trying to impress the situation upon Cameron.

“You idiot, don’t hurt yourself for no reason!”

“Don’t you see? If you stay with me, you’ll die. So _go home_.”

Cameron rolled his eyes and began to laugh. Vincent’s brows knitted in confusion and annoyance.

Wiping mirthful tears from his eyes, Cameron said, "God, you’re such a drama queen! That’s bullshit and you know it. I love you, and I know you love me. Your feelings for me would surpass any other feelings you might have, because you would never be able to live with yourself if you hurt me."

Cameron set his jaw, and inwardly Vincent sighed. He had expected Cameron to be stubborn, but he thought if he showed him everything upfront it would shake him.

He really ought to have known.

Cameron continued. "I can't dictate your life to you, but I can help you live as close to the way you did before, if you let me. Also,” he said, eyes glinting, “I don’t care what shitty teeth and claws you have now, I still won all of our sparring sessions.”

He stuck out his hand. "Fair?"

Vincent frowned, but reluctantly shook Cameron's hand. "All right," he said. “But I can’t be trusted, and you should learn that.”

“Shut up,” Cameron said cheerfully.

It was the second time they had said their vows.

 

 

* * *

Even this close to Vincent, Ravenscroft wouldn't have been able to tell he was a vampire. So much blood in his system made him positively radiant, flushing brightly in all the right places. More human than human.  
  
The drug was wearing off now. Vincent's pupils had returned to their normal size and shape, surrounded by chestnut brown. He took in the messy arc of red-tinged ejaculate on the floor, and met Ravenscroft's eyes. "You drugged me," he said. “Again.”  
  
"I did," was all he said in reply.  
   
More than that, Ravenscroft had engineered someone’s death, using Vincent as the weapon. No, that wasn’t quite right—the person was irrelevant; it was coercing Vincent to kill that was the goal.

The body was gone, but he could smell the remnants of where it had lain, behind him. His memories of killing were shards of senses, more impressions than pictures. It had been... ( _sharp scent of fear, perspiration_ ) a young man, ( _the crinkle of new cloth, the prickle of freshly-buzzed hair_ ) military, ( _sticky wet warmth sliding down one arm, intestines smooth and writhing under his fingers_ ) dispensable and replaceable. They had injected the soldier with a morphine derivative intramuscularly, giving him just enough time to die before it would take effect. Take effect... On Vincent. A containment device. Clever, very clever.  
  
His eyes drifted back to the wet arc on the floor. There was never any indication that Ravenscroft enjoyed his victims sexually, but then what had they really known? They guessed that some victims were his, toys thrown aside when he got bored, but as usual they couldn't prove it. They weren't one hundred percent sure. He wanted to know him, was desperate to understand this man, so _why_ —?  
  
"Don't strain yourself, _lyubimiy_ ," Ravenscroft said. "There is no answer. It simply is. There are many disposable people here, but you are not one of them."

“I don’t understand. You torture, you kill, but you don’t have a history of sexual assault. That’s not your poison with the others; why should it change now?” It was a mistake, conversing with a sadist and psychopath, but one he could no longer take back.

“Are you very familiar with Russian?” was Ravenscroft’s reply. Vincent shook his head warily. “I thought not. _Lyubimiy_ is a term of endearment, like the English _beloved_. What does it say about you that I should call you that?”

“You… All that you know about me is a dossier and two weeks of casual sex. How is that enough for you to love me?” His mouth twisted at the last. This might be obsession, but it sure as hell wasn’t love.

Ravenscroft huffed softly, laughing. "Would you like to know a secret?" he asked, tracing lazy circles on Vincent's abdomen with a finger. He had brought in a wheeled tray of silver instruments, the kind with ways of making one talk. "You think I’m human because I look like this. Yes? Well, you’re only half right." Smiling, he turned away from Vincent and selected a shining, serrated knife, with a six-inch blade and a bone handle. Turning back, satisfied, Ravenscroft gripped the edge of his lips and began sawing at his left cheek.  
  
The skin and muscle parted in ragged edges, revealing pale molars and globules of fat, now stained red. Vincent watched him cut himself with a mixture of fascination and confusion. Ravenscroft almost seemed to be… enjoying the pain.  
  
The last of the skin parted and revealed a grisly view of the inside of Ravenscroft’s mouth. Almost immediately, the air around his cheek rippled as if in a heat haze, and the skin flowed together, time resetting to form a perfect jawline once more.

The dead flesh clamped uselessly in his fingers now seemed shrunken and grey. "In a few hours this will decompose, and it will be like this never happened. You see?"  
  
Over Ravenscroft's shoulder there was a strange mirage. Vincent blinked, unfocused and refocused, looked at it from the corner of his eyes, but it would neither come into clarity nor dissipate. He got an impression of violet, a brightness at its center, the vaguest shape of an arc with rays exiting it, like a wing... It dogged his eye when he closed it as if he was looking too closely at the sun. It loomed over Ravenscroft like a guardian—or, perhaps, like a master.  
  
"What is it?" he said, eyes lingering over Ravenscroft's shoulder. Ravenscroft set the serrated knife aside, this time drawing out a short, curved knife with a polished wood handle. "A souvenir from my time spent in Louisiana," was Ravenscroft's enigmatic reply.  
  
_Isn't that just like you_ , Vincent thought. _Never give answers when riddles will do. Pretend to offer insight, but it's just another hook to use to drag me along._ _  
_  
"Don't fret," Ravenscroft said, turning around with the knife. "You will hear the story soon enough."  
  
He cut into Vincent's abdomen at an angle and dragged the knife across, cleanly and slowly, opening it up. As a gutting it was experienced work, leaving the organs intact and undamaged. Vincent bit down on the inside of his cheek, managing to swallow a cry of pain, his jaw clenched tightly.

Ravenscroft plunged his left hand into the wound, bright blood gushing around his fingers. Finding purchase in a coil of small intestine, he began to pull. Try as he might, Vincent could no longer suppress the strangled, agonized sounds he was making as blood-slick fingers groped at his organs. It was the most intimate, violated feeling he had ever experienced.  
  
Once a coil was free of Vincent's abdominal cavity, Ravenscroft turned to set the knife aside. An odd thing about vampires' healing ability: one could move the organs any which way, but unless they were disconnected from the main body or placed back to their normal positions, the wounds would not heal.  
  
Ravenscroft began pulling, gently but firmly, with both hands.  
  
Vincent could vaguely feel the intestine separate from the greater omentum, a distant sensation like tearing through gauze, magnified through a lens of pain. Inside the abdominal cavity everything ached dully, but the organ sliding through the tight mouth of the wound set the outside aflame. Nausea bubbled in the back of his throat.  
  
One meter, and blood began to drip steadily from Vincent's eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. A warning.  
  
Two meters, and tears mixed with blood, eyes wide and slitted and golden.  
  
Three meters, and the sounds coming from Vincent's throat devolved into soft, intermittent croaks.  
  
Four meters, and the blood had ceased flowing from the wound. The coils on the tray at Ravenscroft's side glistened wetly, no longer the pinkish color of human organ but the mottled grey of a corpse. Every few seconds a minute shudder would run through Vincent, faintly rattling his bonds.  
  
Dimly, it registered to Vincent that the tearing sensation had stopped, and nothing was slithering through his wound. His vision had narrowed into a grey tunnel, only a blurry pinpoint of light left. There was a cool pressure patting his... cheek, he thought. Nerves burnt out with stress found touch hard to quantify. Behind pain everything felt the same.  
  
"Stay with me," a faint voice said from the end of the tunnel. He made no response.  
  
The light shifted, the weight of his head pulled forward. Something grasped his hair. A warm softness pressed insistently against his lips, felt like... A kiss? But as he opened his lips to receive it, something tepid spilled into his mouth, and he swallowed instinctively. His tongue was flooded with the taste of blood, igniting a desperate, mindless, all-consuming need.  
  
Ravenscroft allowed Vincent to canvass his mouth for blood with his tongue, keeping still and savoring the sensation. But when he pulled away, breaking their kiss with a gasp, Vincent snapped at him savagely and caught his bottom lip in his fangs. Momentum tore it from Ravenscroft's face, blood spattering them both, and when he could not find what he sought Vincent spat out the flesh.  
  
Ravenscroft's mouth rippled and reformed, as perfect as before. There was no longer understanding in Vincent's face, only hunger. This time Ravenscroft offered his wrist, and Vincent clamped down on it, sucking greedily at his blood.  
  
After about a minute Vincent let go, golden irises rolling back as he began to convulse. Foam began to form at the corners of his mouth, and his hands spasmed within the manacles, continuously clutching at air. Ravenscroft breathed out, watching him seize.  
  
In his previous experiments with vampires, he had tried feeding some of them his blood. Before expiring, one of them had undergone a similar seizure, and then raved about events in Ravenscroft's life she had no way of knowing. Another became fixated on her own death, which she had foreseen during her episode. Each one reported similar experiences of seeing the past or the future, either their own or his. It appeared that his blood, for vampires, allowed for limited clairvoyance—though with painful and potentially sanity-shattering consequences.  
  
He went to wash his hands. This could take some time.

* * *

Galvanized by Ravenscroft's blood, visions pulsed over Vincent's eyes faster than he could interpret them. Eventually they began to coalesce. There was no stopping the flood of sensory input; no way of calling out or reaching the subjects depicted. It was like watching a life play out from the backseat of his mind.  
  
A dark swamp. A ramshackle house. Countless people strapped to tables, each experiment longer and more gruesome than the last. Somewhere, the sound of a woman crying.  
  
Three children, one of them a sullen dark-haired boy. Now the boy held his own haloed head, a modern martyr. One head became two, and he placed the new head upon his shoulders, where it remained. He tossed the first head into the sky but it never came down.  
  
A cacophony of shrieking like metal on metal. He saw himself kissing Cameron under a torrent of bloody rain, but the kiss sickened and he watched himself rip out Cameron's tongue with his teeth. It was not a beast in his face; it was a man with a choice. He chose poorly.  
  
Time stopped merely passing, began stretching like warm taffy, undulating, revolving. In the vision, the years accelerated forward and backward, weighing down on Vincent's awareness. As the points stretched further from him he too felt himself thinning out, his mind unable to comprehend the hundreds of human lifetimes being lived in that split-second. Space itself distorted. He tried to make himself smaller, tried to collect the atoms of his being and maintain a shape. Visual cues no longer computed. Vaguely the stars tasted like ash and strychnine. Darkness hummed in his nerves; the abyss of time dragging him in all directions. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt.  
  
He let go.

* * *

Blood-crusted eyes opened to an unfamiliar ceiling. Everything was white; stark, functional, but a living space instead of a dungeon. His dirty hands looked profane amidst such smoothly colorless surroundings. His shoulders felt stiff and alien. It was strange to move his arms after so long.  
  
He stood up, and realized he was whole, undamaged, and no longer in pain. Where his wrists had been chafed raw, where a slashed smile had opened his guts, there was nothing but unblemished skin.  
  
He had been lying on an angular futon, more than a cot, less than a bed. The room was windowless but a soft, ambient light suffused the air. It looked like a small studio apartment, fifteen feet wide, ten feet high, and twenty feet deep. In one corner there was a door, which he assumed led to a bathroom. On the opposite wall from the futon was the unit door, looking sturdier and possibly metal, painted over. Peeking inside the smaller door, he realized that not only was it a bathroom, but it had a shower unit and towels, and there was a neat tower of cloth on the shelf that turned out to be white cotton scrubs.  
  
He searched the rest of the room, finding little. There were no cameras, no appliances, no power outlets, not even any linens. In fact, the only amenities aside from the towels and clothes were two tiny, hotel-sized bottles in the shower of sandalwood-scented soap.  
  
He frowned at the nondescript labels. That was a peculiar choice, sandalwood. An oddly specific choice. It was possible someone had relayed such trivial preferences to Ravenscroft after a survey of Vincent's home, but what would be the point?  
  
Unable to pinpoint the reason, he filed the information away for later and considered his next move. There was nothing here, be it something he could use against someone or that they could use against him. Judging by the items provided, he was being allowed to take a shower. It seemed wildly out of character for it to be a trap, whether via poison in the soap or water or by taking him by surprise in a compromising position. Ravenscroft was more of a showman than an opportunist when it came to death. Vincent decided to take the risk.  
  
Testing the shower, he realized that they had gone a step beyond and given him hot water. He stepped into it and scrubbed the dust and blood from himself until his skin was raw, and even once he was clean he stood in the scalding spray until it ran cold. Finally, fingertips wrinkled and waterlogged, he emerged and dried off and dressed in the scrubs.  
  
His skin tingled pleasantly all over, being clean as alien a feeling as the absence of pain. He ran fingers across his stomach absently, imagining them making furrows in the skin, the furrows becoming gashes, the gashes becoming tunnels, fingers caressing pulsing organs—  
  
He closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and counted to ten. The thought dissolved into smoke, and there was a knock at the door.  
  
Ravenscroft entered looking deceptively benign in a dress shirt and slacks, sleeves rolled up, shutting the door behind him. "Feeling better?" he said by way of greeting. Vincent said nothing. Ravenscroft took a seat on the couch and gestured for Vincent to accompany him.  
  
Vincent tried to look relaxed, sitting solidly in the futon with one leg crooked beneath him. Hoping that appearing relaxed would help him actually be so. It wasn't working. Ravenscroft gazed at him levelly, a man who could wait millennia for the right opportunity. Finally, anxiety getting the better of him, Vincent said, "Why sandalwood?"  
  
Ravenscroft blinked. "I wanted to put you at ease."  
  
He scoffed. Couldn't help but laugh bitterly. "A few hours ago you pulled out my small intestine, and now you want to put me at ease?"  
  
"Did it help?" was all the answer he received.  
  
"Not really," Vincent lied. If Ravenscroft could tell, he didn't let on.  
  
Abruptly, it occurred to Vincent that despite enduring enough agony to pass out, he wasn't ravenous. With dawning dread, he asked, "Why am I not starving?"  
  
"You had an... interesting... reaction to my blood. So instead I gave you about a litre of one of the nurse's."  
  
"Your blood...?" Images poured into Vincent's awareness, previously buried in the back of his mind but now clamouring to be recognized. Foremost among them was a derelict house sinking into mud, an aura of nightmarish otherness so thick it could be carved. There was—something—in that house. Something that nibbled at the edges of his mind, chewing at his thoughts. A sense of horror waiting like the tip of an iceberg.  
  
"It can be a bit of a shock sometimes. You took it very well, actually. Most often the others came out the other side not all there, I'm afraid."  
  
Vincent frowned, sorting through the things he could remember seeing. "There was a boy in my—vision. He looked like you, but he had black hair."  
  
Something sharp and hungry flickered over Ravenscroft's face. "My son, Etienne."  
  
"He was dead, but they brought him back. The girl with his face, and the blond boy. Now the three are in San Francisco together."  
  
"That would be Estelle, Etienne's twin, and Quentin, their half-brother. Those two were raised by my ex-wife, Theresa."  
  
It was hard to imagine this hard-edged, snakelike man having a wife, let alone ever choosing to have children. Vincent's incredulity must have been obvious, because Ravenscroft said, "Having children wasn't my preference, but we all make sacrifices for love."  
  
Vincent hesitated. He wanted answers, yes, but he was also afraid of what they would tell him. "The house. That's where it came from, isn't it? Your souvenir."  
  
Ravenscroft nodded. "It is."  
  
"Why does... No. How do you keep something so powerful in a cage? Doesn't it want out?"  
  
Ravenscroft smiled slightly at something far away. "Trial and error. And a lot of sacrifices. But at least this way the cage is more like a home."  
  
"So this is what you do? What you really do, behind the money and science experiments and murder. You drug vampires to provide you with glimpses of the future?" Vincent asked.  
  
"It is one of the things I do. It isn't the only thing," Ravenscroft said.  
  
"A jack-of-all-trades, of course," Vincent muttered darkly. _And what things are you not a master of?_ Even though Ravenscroft answered every question, Vincent felt more in the dark than before. "What is it that you're looking for?" he asked.  
  
That must have been the wrong question, because Ravenscroft's eyes became cool and distant. "The place where my other half dwells," he said, as enigmatic as before. But then he went on: "Etienne is the key to that, but he is opaque to me. So I must use others as my guides."  
  
That explained the numerous vampires he had seen, all in the painful and perilous rapture of Ravenscroft's experiments. "How many others are you keeping, like me?"  
  
"There have been... countless others. I don't even remember. But ones like you?" Ravenscroft shook his head, a slight smile gracing his lips again. "There has never been one like you."  
  
Ravenscroft stood up, holding out his hand. "Come, I want to show you something."  
  
"I think I'll stay here, if it's all the same to you," Vincent said, fear sharpening his tongue. Anywhere Ravenscroft was going to take him would not be as benign as these white walls. The specter of pain loomed in his thoughts.  
  
Ravenscroft looked at him with an unreadable expression, more than a glance, less than a stare. But he took Vincent at his word, and left him.  
  
The thought struck Vincent that he was going to die here.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"This will be a learning experience for you, if I recall," Ravenscroft said. "Don't you think you should familiarize yourself with your body's limits?"_

ii.  
  
The acrid smell of ammonia thrust Vincent into waking, his eyes rolling while everything else remained suspiciously still. He tried to turn his head, and even that slight motion made his vision spin. He felt endless and empty, paper-thin. Hungry.

" _Dobriy vyecher_ ," Ravenscroft said, as something tightened around Vincent's waist. "It was a valiant effort you made, trying to stay awake, but sleep claims us all in the end."  
  
Vincent coughed slightly, but his throat still felt gritty. "Do you ever say anything that doesn't sound like a Gothic fortune cookie?" he said. He had given up the idea that what he said would make a difference here. Ravenscroft laughed softly and continued tightening. Vincent realized there were straps covering him, evenly spaced and made of thick leather, binding him to a metal operating table. Tough enough even vampiric strength wouldn't unseat them. Despite this, he was undressed. The absurdity of it was almost laughable.  
  
A needle pierced his arm, he noticed, leading to an IV and a bag already half-full of blood. As he watched, the level rose, and the cause for his hunger, his dizziness, became clear.  
  
"This will be a learning experience for you, if I recall," Ravenscroft said. "Don't you think you should familiarize yourself with your body's limits?"  
  
Vincent paled. "I found that _not_ getting myself injured was a better learning experience," he said, but he couldn't quash the fear that seeped into his voice. He heard a spinning sound, a snarling buzz like a swarm of hornets, and Ravenscroft raised the object into his line of sight.  
  
It was a handheld buzzsaw.

“Normally, in a surgical setting, this saw is reserved for cranial operations,” Ravenscroft explained, displaying the circular saw blade and its purposefully missing wedge. “But there’s something about a circular saw and its motion that I find... exhilarating.”

"No," Vincent pleaded, straining against the straps. "No, no, don't—Don't do this—" Useless protests fell from his lips, fell on uncaring ears. Now that he had started struggling he couldn't seem to stop.  
  
Ravenscroft placed a warm hand on Vincent's forehead, pushing his bangs from his eyes. "Shh, shh. You will thank me for this later." He paused, taking back his hand and putting a thoughtful finger to his lips. "What to send, what to send... An arm will do, yes. Your hands are so distinctive he will not have trouble recognizing one of them."  
  
Alarm spiraled through Vincent's thoughts. "Leave Cameron out of this!" he said, but it sounded more like panic than anger while his fear still choked the air. Ravenscroft just smiled, as if he were a particularly charming, if unruly, pet.

Vincent watched the saw lower to his arm in slow motion, the buzz filling his ears, rattling his skull, barreling down upon him like a bullet train. Fear combining with adrenaline made him feverish, phantom heat smothering his skin in prickling waves.

The spinning blade touched skin, parted it effortlessly, blood spattering everywhere. It was so sharp that at first Vincent felt nothing—until the saw reached muscle and his nerves caught up to it.

Shaking, straining, feeling the blade jag against unstable meat, Vincent clenched his jaw against the protests clawing to leave his throat. Pain fractured his awareness, but he watched a bright film of blood transform Ravenscroft's features from handsome to grotesque. The saw cut slowly through Vincent's arm above the elbow while Ravenscroft savored it, drew it out as long as he could.

Tears pricked in the corners of Vincent’s eyes, tracked cool trails down flushed, aching cheeks. The saw reached bone, grinding and growling, insatiable, and finally teased heady, raw screams from his throat.

Through the cracks in his sight, past the red haze, Vincent saw a smile blooming slowly over Ravenscroft’s lips, and something that was not pain ignited briefly deep inside him. His eyes blurred and the feeling faded, inscrutable and inimitable. The screams that echoed in his ears sounded almost like desperate pleas.

At about the same time the saw finished cutting through his arm, Vincent's voice gave out, and he could only croak slightly, shivering, as Ravenscroft finished the amputation. Instead of providing skin flaps to close over the stump and stitch it together, he left it open, meat and bone weeping in the open air. There was little blood left in Vincent's body now, and vampires ran no risk of infection.  
  
Ravenscroft tenderly wiped the sweat, blood, and tears from Vincent's face with a damp, clean cloth. Vincent's eyes fixed on Ravenscroft's, yet the muscles around them could not portray anger as he would have wanted. All the look said was "obsession," no matter what Vincent truly felt. Ravenscroft seemed to accept it anyway.  
  
A shroud like thousands of lengthy thorns enveloped Vincent's every feeling, draining his will, confusing his senses. Distant images floated in his sight, haloed and warped, and his focus slid from that gruesome visage. Color swam in and out of his consciousness. Hearing was distinct, yet he was unable to actively listen; snippets came and went without any logic to them. Everything tasted like metal, smelled like ammonia and fresh meat.  
  
Ravenscroft exchanged the last bag full of Vincent's blood with one he had prepared earlier. There must have been more where it came from; one bag would not be enough.  
Vincent felt the slow drip of blood into his body by its temperature, a cool stream crawling up his arm, into his chest. It sang to him, not into his ears but into his mind, a melody that warped and sighed and skittered around the edges of his awareness. Every time he tried to focus on it, it faded.

With fresh blood in his system, the emptiness eased, but the dizziness worsened; now three blurry shapes with Ravenscroft's face wavered in his eyes, intent on him. He tried to speak, but even a whisper consumed his throat with fire. He tried to close his eyes, and it was as if he had catapulted himself into an abyss, stomach lurching, nausea licking at his entrails. Determined not to be sick, his eyes sprang open, forced to acknowledge the spectral trio.  
  
His hearing contracted, finally resolving into something resembling sense, though it too was fuzzy around the edges, sepulchral. "...ink it should be two days or so before you regain the use of your arm. I have prepared plenty of my blood for you in the meantime, don’t worry. I will return later to check in on you." A hand rested briefly on his leg.  
  
" _Sladkikh snov_ ," the voice said, and the trio retreated.  


* * *

It was easy, at first. The visions started small, creeping into his awareness like brown mice, unassuming and unobtrusive. He watched them play out like films, more than dreams, less than memories. Some of them he forgot, some of them he remembered.  
  
He drifted into flashes of a small child who could only be a young Ravenscroft; a boy who spent most of his days contemplating time.  
  
Certainly, it was strange for a child to be aware of it that early, but he was already strange. From the day he could speak he could tell time; not a one of his instructors understood how. They taught him how to read a clock, but even when there was no clock, even when he couldn't see the sky, even when he had been asleep for hours, he always knew.

His mother did not think this as odd as his instructors, but she was a level-headed woman who accepted the facts as they appeared to her. It harmed no one and was even useful, in its way, so she left it alone.

Despite the fact that he went for days at a time without seeing his mother, being raised mostly by instructors and household servants and family friends, when they reunited he was always pleased to see her. When she left, he never cried, but when she returned he always had a smile for her. For others, a smile was rare, his face more often somber and contemplative.  
  
When he was small, the contemplation was simple. _Why does mother have to leave?_ Because she has a duty to her business. _When will she return?_ In a few days. _Will her duties be done then?_ For a while.  
  
But then it became complex. _How long must I study?_ Until you have memorized these formulas. _When will I be an adult?_ Once you have experienced enough. _When will mother return?_ When she is ready to come home.  
  
_Will mother die?_ Yes.  
  
_Will I die, too?_ Yes. All living things die. It is the way of the world. Things live, things die, things live anew. It is a cycle.  
  
_When will we die?_ Not for a long time.  
  
These complications frustrated Ravenscroft, but they also provided a spark. At age ten, he began to study biology even outside of lessons, quickly advancing beyond his year in the hopes of finding an answer. Why is there death? What is life? What causes the body to break down?  
  
Life could, after all, be said to be nature's way of keeping meat fresh. Was it bacteria? A sickness?  
  
It turned out that part of the answer was "time." Later, he would learn that the other part was "entropy."

 

* * *

Vincent started, a hypnic jerk knocking him back into awareness. The room was dimmer than before; only a bare bulb hanging above him, creating an island of weak greyish light in a sea of shadows. His stump prickled and itched, feverishly hot. He thought he saw bloody tendrils snaking out of the edges, thought it used to be shorter but—he couldn't say for sure.  
  
Were there even nurses here? Ravenscroft mentioned them, but it was as if they were ghosts. He had never seen one. In fact, he had seen no one here but Ravenscroft; even the young soldier whom he had drained was more like a dream than a reality. All the memories he had of that encounter were afterthoughts. Was it possible that only the two of them inhabited whatever labyrinthine place this was? He couldn't decide if the thought comforted him or concerned him.  
  
He wondered what time it was, what day it was, how long he had been here. Then he realized that none of it mattered. Time was an illusion. His world began and ended here.  
  
From the corner shadows there was a sound like a cough, then a heavy slithering. He craned his neck but could see nothing but grey and black. He waited, but the sounds did not return.  
  
He stared at the light until it blurred and burst into a thousand stars. It reminded him of fireworks, of laughing and talking with Cameron on a wide green lawn on New Year's Eve, breath steaming in the chill night air. Last year they had encountered the largest Catherine wheel they had ever seen, all red and gold, sparks raining everywhere. They'd been lucky not to catch fire, honestly.  
  
The false stars danced, flickered. Somewhere nearby a door slammed, and then he could hear a heavy tapping, like clawed feet on tile. The stars went out.  
  
Color deserted him, but his eyes still saw grey shapes, hazy outlines. Two greyish pinpoints approached him, shiny dark eyes in an angular face. The tapping was louder, and now accompanying it was a soft, dry creak like the movement of something dead. The light flickered on, searing Vincent's night vision, and he felt something long and cold and sharp, like fingers, like knives, touch his thigh. Alarmed, he strained his neck, blinked rapidly trying to solidify his vision, but he couldn't see, and he couldn't move. The touch vanished. So did the light.  
  
Colorless bursts wavered in his eyes, and a voice came from the foot of the table. In the darkness, the voice circled him, humming a slow song that Vincent didn't recognize. Soon, the humming became a low whisper that sounded like Russian, and Vincent understood.  
  
Hoarsely, he said, "It's not like you to play games with me. If you're going to do something, just do it."  
  
The voice laughed, and it sounded like metal chairs scraping along the floor. A finger, a claw, stroked the inside of his leg, and this time he couldn't suppress the shiver.  
  
The restraints around his ankles loosened, then the ones around his thighs. There was a small thunk as the last panel of the table dropped, leaving the bottom halves of his legs hanging. Pinpoint eyes stepped closer, closer...  
  
Vincent grabbed its face with the soles of his feet, twisted his hips, jerked hard and quick. He felt the neck snap, accompanied by a wet crackle; a sharp pain lanced through his stump, wetness dripping from places he shouldn't be able to feel. He pulled his legs back, toes searching for the joint in the table. With only one arm, there would be no working through the straps. He'd have to break the whole table into pieces to be free.  
  
As his toes found the weak point, something silken coiled around his legs, cool and flat and flexible. His muscles tensed to push against the chair but the coils constricted, strong spirals like satin ribbons forcing his legs apart. He struggled against them, but they held him fast, unyielding. There was a long, gasping breath from the end of the table, like a death rattle in reverse.  
  
Smooth hands with bladed fingers caressed his legs, and Vincent blanched. The touch was careful and light, drawing gooseflesh along his skin as it slid. When they reached the swell of his ass, the hands grasped around the soft flesh and dug in. Soft, slow kisses began above his knee, trailing into the hollow of his thigh, where they became small, sharp bites. Fear made Vincent's pulse quicken, but it wasn't only fear he was feeling. Already, blood was making its way to his groin, betraying his reaction to his agitator, and he could do nothing to stop it. Worse; there was a part of him that didn’t want to.  
  
Lifting his head, he glimpsed sharp cheekbones, a chiseled jaw. A long, slow stroke of wetness traveled along the crease where Vincent's thigh met his pelvis, all the way up to his navel. He shivered, skin tingling, savoring these touches even as he loathed himself for it. Hot breath retraced the trail of saliva, teeth dragging at it lightly, before circling back to his half-hard shaft. A hand drew back, cupping his testes, kneading them, fingers startlingly human now. The hand moved on to grip his growing erection, hard enough that Vincent cried out instinctively. He could feel his throbbing pulse against the hand, pleasure radiating from it, and he gave up trying to resist.  
  
Fingers slid away to grasp his thigh, replaced by an ardent tongue and a hot, wet throat. Lips over teeth plied firmly down, the tip of his cock meeting soft palate and the tightness of esophagus. Just that supple embrace made him shudder, ecstasy rolling in like a tide, an ocean in which he would drown. The dull ache from his battered stump flared into sparks of pain, complementing the sweetness of fellatio. Lips began moving rhythmically up and down, slowly at first and then picking up speed, driving his not inconsiderable length down an eager throat. The ocean became a storm, waves crashing over his head, submerging him in pleasure. Without thinking, he matched his own shivering thrusts to its rhythm, hanging onto himself by a thread.  
  
Pressure built like clouds heavy with rain, splintering his thoughts, and he thrust harder into that sweet void. The void understood, moving faster, shoving further, as if it had no gag reflex at all. Knifelike nails tore into his hips, the wounds only adding fuel to Vincent's ardor. In a crescendo of lightning Vincent climaxed in static and white, his agitator swallowing all his seed without a sound.  
  
He lay there for some time, in the darkness, remembering how to move. The... thing—had it truly been Ravenscroft?—had melted back into the darkness after Vincent came, tendrils sliding away from his legs, leaving him to dangle on the table in postcoital reverie.  
  
Except now, able to feel and move again, the light now returned, he realized that there was solid weight beneath his heels, that he couldn't bend his knees. He had been strapped down once more. Confused, he craned his neck, trying to see his thighs. Now that he thought about it, he felt none of the gashes that should still linger. The only pain radiated from his arm, quickly becoming a familiar background sensation.  
  
He soured, cursing himself for his blindness. That was no vision, no dream, no memory.

It was a hallucination.  


* * *

It got harder after that. Stranger. As if by allowing that one hallucination to pass it opened the floodgates for the rest.  
  
Ravenscroft returned after a few hours to put a fresh bag in the IV. If he noticed Vincent peering at him with more than his usual amount of apprehension, he made no show of it. However, neither did he stay to talk, as he often did.  
  
As Ravenscroft left, a haze lingered where he had stood, emitting a stuporous vapor that lulled Vincent into pliancy. It felt alien yet incredibly familiar, like the feeling of a word on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to remember, wanted to know, but chasing that thought led him disastrously astray. He blinked, trying to see out of the fog that had captured him, but grey was all there was.  
  
Moving forward, an electric shock caught him by surprise, catapulting up his spine. There, in front of him, was the house. That monstrous hellmouth that whispered desolation in his dreams.  
  
To be fair, it wasn't really about the house, as a structure. The house had been there for maybe seventy years, lived in sporadically. Every family that lived there quickly moved away, whispering about ghosts or spontaneous illnesses, feelings of dread. No one understood why.  
  
There had been many deaths in and around the immediate area. The first family to live there had three children, and the youngest had sickened and died, not even three years old. Not so odd, for the time, until the next event. One day the middle child watched the eldest climb the stairs to the top floor, and simply vanish. No trace of him was ever found; no bones, no teeth, no clothes. No one believed her when the middle child described what she saw. Finally, the family had kept a pack of dogs, all loyal and well-trained and full of life. But one summer evening when all were full grown, they had been found dead: each ripped apart as if they had gone into a frenzy with one another. The dwindling family seized on their choice to leave.  
  
The others were similar. A pair of down-on-their-luck men looking for cheap rent developed severe schizophrenia after six months in the house, despite a lack of such disorders in their heritage. Their institutional records mentioned that they would often sit absolutely still for days, to the point of severe dehydration, murmuring in languages no one could understand.  
  
Three squatters were eventually discovered at the house in states of advanced decay; autopsies revealed numerous lacerations covering each body comprised of the Latin phrase "tempus edax rerum". Time, devourer of all things. It was unclear where the phrase had originated among the squatters.  
  
But even before the house had been built, incidents had occurred. It was simply that no one could connect them to any specific person, place, or thing. Not until there was a house.  


* * *

Alexa de Qamra would be the key to it. She was the crux of many things in Ravenscroft's life, truth be told, but before she was any of those things, she was a dedicated, talented magician.  
  
They met when he was on sabbatical in New Orleans, familiarizing himself with America in the hopes of creating stable partnerships with a few notable families of crime there. She was there on her off hours, taking a day's break to see the sights and send a postcard home to San Francisco. It was 1985.  
  
"Pardon me, miss, but would you—"  
  
She turned to face the caller, and a look of shock flashed over her face. She composed herself quickly, affecting a polite smile and a questioning eye. "Excuse me. I thought you were someone I knew," she said. "Is there something I can help with?"  
  
"Do you know where I can find Frenchmen Street? I told a friend I would meet him, but I'm hopelessly lost, it seems."  
  
"I'm terribly sorry, but I'm not actually a local either," she said, looking abashed.  
  
"Oh, of course, my mistake," he said, offering his hand. "Thank you for your time."  
  
Amused, she took his hand in a warm grasp, which he cordially returned, surprisingly gentle for such a high-class-looking man. _He knows the right handshake for a situation_ , she thought. And there was something else, a faint tingling where their hands touched. _He's a magician!_ she realized, keeping her face poised even while her thoughts raced. She made her decision.  
  
"Actually," she said, "I know of a cafe nearby whose owner is extremely familiar with the area. She helped me recently; maybe she can help you?"  
  
In the end, he never made it to Frenchmen Street. He had to go see about a girl.  


* * *

They bonded quickly, she with her strong will and tenacity, he with his casual grace and careful studiousness. They even shared the same dry wit, and often enjoyed simply people-watching and making commentary to each other regarding the passersby. They were realists, viewing the world through pragmatic lenses, but who believed in the power of humanity to overcome obstacles through science.  
  
Or magic, as it happened.  
  
The first couple of times they met, she thought he was simply hiding his power. It took either courage or rare stupidity to use magic in public, and the magicians she was familiar with would never risk exposure for anything less than a life-threatening situation.  
  
But the third time was different.  
  
They treaded countless hours in the botanical gardens at City Park, Alexa regaling him with her hobbyist's knowledge of flowers, Ravenscroft detailing to her the differences between America and Russia. Finally, tired and hungry, they retired to a pleasant Italian ice cream parlor not too far away for coffee and an afternoon snack.  
  
"Two double cappuccinos, a slice of cassata, and a cannoli, please," he said at the register, handing over a twenty-dollar bill as Alexa saved them a table by the window. He brought back the pastries just as two noisy teenage boys came in, talking and laughing.  
  
"Two double cappuccinos!" the barista called shortly. Alexa shifted to stand, but Ravenscroft was already up, smiling and waving his hand at her to sit. There, the coffee was served strong and hot in ceramic mugs, complete with saucer and a doily. A European sense of refinement carried over from Italy.  
  
The teenagers were standing by, waiting for their drinks and eating ice cream. One of them was gesticulating wildly in front of the counter where the drinks came out. "Excuse me," Ravenscroft said, and they moved to the side. He picked up the saucers with steady hands, turning back to the table, when there was a sudden thump to his shoulder. Coffee sloshed onto the floor, meeting his trouser leg on the way down, to the sound of profuse apologies from the boy.  
  
Scowling, but uninterested in making a scene, Ravenscroft shook his head and muttered, "Don't worry about it," and returned to his table. He handed the brimming cup to Alexa and took the less full one for himself.  
  
Alexa leaned forward. "Aren't you going to fix that?" she whispered, gesturing to his cup. Ravenscroft's forehead creased, and he said bemusedly, "It's still good coffee. Accidents happen."

Now Alexa looked confused. "You mean you don't—?" But she stopped. Making sure no one was paying attention to them, she dipped a finger in his coffee and began tracing an odd pictograph on the table with it. Then she whispered, " _Redeo_ ."  
  
The coffee in the saucer and the coffee on his trousers disappeared, returning to his cup as if it had never spilled. "Like magic," she said, winking at him.  
  
" _Nichego sebe!_ " he whispered under his breath. Awed, fascinated, he leaned forward. "Tell me how you did that."  
  
"After we leave. It does no good to startle the unsuspecting," she said, smiling and sipping her coffee.  
  
Though Alexa was not a teacher by trade, she found an exuberant fulfillment teaching Ravenscroft how to kindle magic. At first she taught him small, useful spells; how to heat coffee when it became tepid, how to find his car keys when they were lost. Then she noticed his affinity for time: he never wore a watch because he could always tell what time it was, no matter the situation. Even if there was no light to be had.  
  
All magicians had an affinity. Sometimes it was simple, a musician who worked wonders with sound, an horticulturist whose talents lay with flowers. Sometimes it was more complex; Alexa had a highly organized affinity for barriers, both dismantling them and building them. In a life without magic, this may have led her to architecture or cybersecurity. As it stood, she consulted on magical security and, sometimes, magical anomalies.  


* * *

One such anomaly waited outside a village in Louisiana, taunting Alexa in its impenetrable incongruity.  
  
The village's name was Absalom, population 1,302, seated in Lower St. Martin Parish. It was a little less than two hours from New Orleans.  
  
The villagers, for their part, tried very hard to pretend that life in their small, swampy town was normal. That there wasn't a haunted house just at the edge of their living space, looming in their dreams out of the corner of an eye. No one talked about it.  
  
But it whispered to them.  
  
When the village had found the three squatters, it tried to ignore the problem as it had done. But soon after that, two teenagers went missing—and one turned up dead a week later, mummified. The town was aghast, agape, confounded. That was when Alexa offered the the town her services.  
  
She and her family, the de Qamras, were spread all over the world helping those born with magical talent find their way. Sometimes this meant magical training, and sometimes it meant occluding the supernatural from humans that could not handle the truth. The masquerade was important; it kept them safe and sane and alive. Witch hunts had quite literally happened for far less.

To humans she and her team advertised as exorcists, ghost hunters. It was a little like running a law firm by word of mouth only; desperate people in need of permanent solutions asked fewer questions than skeptics. So far, their success rate was one hundred percent across fifteen cases. A haunted house here. A sinister object there. Places where time and technology acted in irrational and unpredictable ways.  
  
Yet in Absalom, they were stuck.  
  
It had been two months, scouring the energy fields around the house, within the house, for weak points. The closest they could find was a slightly thinner veil where the front door was, as if the house understood the idea of a threshold. No one went into the house if they could help it except for Christine, naturally curious and immune to the house's black charms. As a vampire, she heard the house whisper in her dreams but felt none of the energy while awake. Eventually she light-proofed a room and began sleeping there, when they had no more ideas.  
  
Christine stepped over the threshold to the outside and Alexa grimaced. "I'm glad we found something new to try, but I can't imagine trying to sleep there. Are you sure you're feeling all right?"  
  
"Don't worry your pretty head, darling. I think if it were going to try anything it would have done so already," Christine said, equal parts Southern belle and great white shark. She tucked stray hairs of her short dark bob behind her ear.  
  
Alexa still looked concerned, but couldn't offer anything beyond routine. "All right, but I need you to keep checking in with Amrita every day, just like you have been. It's better than nothing."  
  
Christine smiled, flashing fang. "Will do," she said.  
  
Alexa peered at the house. It was two stories tall, with a gabled roof and a full front porch. Its style evoked the Creole cottages popular in the area, but with its central hallway and second story it would be more accurately termed a Tidewater. It might have been a stately home when it was first built, but now the floors dipped and the walls rotted, and it was slowly sinking into the swamp.  
  
She turned back to Christine. "I have someone meeting us here soon. Not an expert, but he has a good eye for details and a hell of a lot of potential. I want to see if, with his help, I can try again to deconstruct the barrier here, maybe get to the core, even."  
  
"Sure," Christine said, "if you think he can do it. You’re the magician.”

Alexa nodded. She had seen it in her dreams; he was the missing piece to their puzzle.

Not long after, Ravenscroft appeared, looking handsome and composed despite the mud and humidity. Christine sent a knowing glance Alexa’s way, but she pretended not to notice. Christine noted how his eyes lingered over the house as he approached, as if with… longing?

Ravenscroft shook Christine’s hand and then turned to Alexa. “What do you need me to do?” he said.

Alexa held up the cone in her hand. It was a thick glass spike wrapped with copper wire, about ten inches long. “I’m almost finished setting up a perimeter, then we can go inside. It’s safer if you stay here, but I suppose you’re welcome to see it for yourself as long as you stay outside.”

“Yes, go. I’ll be here,” he said. She smiled in return and headed for the back of the house.

Christine also turned to go, waving at him with a parting, “I’ll be back in a few. Have to check in with Amrita.”

His skin itched, vibrating with a need he could not place. Trying to soothe it, he began walking, watching the house intently as if it could suck him in at any time. With every step nearer the sensation strengthened, and even if he wanted to turn back he was no longer in control of his legs. Murmurs in strange, ancient tongues crowded fervently against his awareness, muffling all other sounds. Behind the open door of the house, within the darkness he could almost see the wavering ghosts of all those the house had claimed.

Mud sucked at his boots, but he barely noticed. Distantly he felt a chime like a silver bell that must have been the perimeter sealing. The threshold beckoned him, looming, only ten feet away. Five feet. He crossed it.

The murmurs became screams, and everything exploded.

 

* * *

Vincent waded back through a sea of fog to feel a hand in his and a surging itch in his stump. It felt like radar pinging, nerves firing at random, and once he could focus he realized he had healed enough to have formed about half of the elbow joint. The itch crested and he clenched jaw and fist, trying not to think about it. Bones creaked beneath his fingers and, alarmed, he quickly released his grip.

Ravenscroft shifted slightly at his side, unperturbed. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said, still grasping Vincent’s hand lightly. “Did you have a nice dream?”

Vincent unstuck his lips and swallowed, tongue feeling furred and foreign. “How long have you been there?”

“Not long. A few minutes.”

Vincent scowled in suspicion, but said nothing. Ravenscroft changed the subject. “You, on the other hand, were out for quite a long time. I heard you talking in your sleep.”

Vincent scoffed. “It’s hard to stay quiet when the hallucinations won’t leave me alone. You should know that.” The tidal itch in his arm swept back in, this time washing over his whole body in a prickling wave. He jerked involuntarily, body fighting against the itch, against being kept in the same position for hours. Leather straps chafed raw skin.

He thought about begging to be released from the table, imagined the freedom of standing on his own feet, unbound and unrestrained. Being able to alleviate his wretched body’s needs on his own. Then he imagined that same freedom allowing him to tear Ravenscroft’s throat out, sinking claws into guts and eviscerating him, eliminating the force holding him down—

A sharp laugh came from his side, Ravenscroft smiling with imperfect teeth. “You’re so cute, _lyubimiy_. I’m surprised it took this long for you to want to kill me.” He leaned in, whispering, “It was all over your face, that need. I know that look.”

He sat back. “Tell me about your dreams, please.” So polite, so charming. Vincent wanted to gag. He turned his head away, pretending he hadn’t heard.

He waited for Ravenscroft’s retribution but it was nowhere to be found. Apprehension prickled at the back of his neck, but only air disturbed him; he refused to turn back to confirm that nothing untoward waited. Instead he stared at the grey wall, trying not to think about his circumstances. Faces floated over the concrete, Cameron’s among them.

He wondered what Cameron was doing now. Tearing his hair out trying to find him. Hunting down every faint hope himself. Working past the point of exhaustion.  
  
_Are you pining for your absent love, or for the moral direction he offered you?_

Vincent ignored the voice; tried to imagine Cameron’s routine instead. He would have called in every favor he was owed, perhaps even begged Choudhuri for a search team to be assembled. He would have beat the streets himself for days.

_You are only as strong as the person you set above yourself. It's how you learned to survive, after all. And if sometimes you surpassed them... Well, that just meant you needed to find a new master._  
  
I need no one to lead me. I take responsibility for my choices and actions.

_The first thing you did under your own power after becoming a vampire was to slaughter a man. You didn’t even try to find an option that didn't involve hurting someone. Yet, as soon as you were back under your master's thumb, you did things his way. Took only enough blood to survive. Drank from the hospital supply as much as you could. But every night, you looked at him and you_ ached _to kill him._

Confronted by a deeply unpleasant train of thought, he turned back to Ravenscroft. As much as he did not feel like discussing anything with his torturer, he was more eager to avoid his own thoughts. “Mostly I dreamed about you,” he said sourly. “Some of your childhood. How you and Alexa de Qamra met. Surprisingly ordinary things.”

He did not mention the monstrous hallucination.

“I saw you walk into the house, but… I don’t know what happened after. I saw you learning magic with her, practicing simple things. Fixing spilled coffee. Unlocking a door. I didn’t even know magic existed until…” _Until you,_ he finished mentally, but did not want to give Ravenscroft the satisfaction of it.

“Magic in the world is a well-kept secret,” Ravenscroft agreed. “I was surprised too when I learned of it.”

A sharp pain pricked the corner of Vincent’s eye, and he blinked hard, trying to clear it. _An eyelash_ , he thought as it burned. He said, “It makes you wonder what else we haven’t met yet. How many possibilities there are waiting for us. But people just mill around in their tiny boxes and don’t pay attention even when they see extraordinary things.”

It occurred to Vincent that he was once one of those people blind to the extraordinary, ignoring everything he couldn’t touch. He himself was such a rare creature, and yet he never gave thought to whether other fantastic things could exist. There was no telling the things he might have found with a more curious mind. But that was what he had Cameron for, of course. A foil, a guide.

“Alexa taught me much, not all of it strictly magic,” Ravenscroft said. “I learned a lot just by watching her move through her world.”

Vincent contemplated just when Ravenscroft’s life began to break down. He had seemed normal even when he had met Alexa, despite his upbringing. _Did she teach you how to torture?_ he thought, shocked that he had spoken aloud when Ravenscroft said, “No, that I learned on my own.” Vincent might have imagined the smallest tinge of regret that accompanied those words. Ravenscroft’s face betrayed nothing.

A band of hot pressure encircled Vincent’s half-finished elbow, tightening around the new flesh with sharp spines. Something slithered around the bone and cartilage there, grinding them close, wresting a pained grunt from his throat. A smaller, similar feeling repeated in his undamaged arm. He looked sharply at his stump as he felt strange, wet tendrils reach open air, as if he had grown new fingers without an arm. But they weren’t fingers; they were thick and green and tough, and as he watched they grew long, curved thorns of a vivid scarlet.

From the crook in his left arm the thorns rose out of his veins, itching and stabbing. Gaze transfixed on the coiling briar, with bravado he most definitely did not feel, he said shakily, “Plant growth, that’s new.” The burning snaked its way up his arm and into his neck, the pain in his eye no longer passing as an eyelash but a leisurely stabbing pain. He began to sweat.

Something writhed behind his eye, joining the pain. It pushed up through the organ, wriggling, thorns dragging through the gel, and tepid, viscous wetness oozed down Vincent’s cheek. He scrabbled at the table uselessly with his good hand, straining, body distorting, seizing with tendrils of pain, his mouth sandpaper-dry—his veins were no longer channels but vines, thousands upon thousands of thorns bursting from his skin—

His remaining eye rolled, and snagged on the thing impaling his eye. A curious sensation like cloth flapping gently in a breeze surrounded the stalk, and something unfurled. Leaves, and above that, above everything, a pale pink flower with five petals. Faintly, he smelled roses.

Dread gripped him like a vice, his pulse skyrocketing, the incessant, invisible march of insects on his skin warping into a turbulent ocean, threatening to crawl right off his bones. The briar coiled around him, through him now, consuming him in green. Panicked, desperate, his good eye locked on Ravenscroft’s face and he choked out, “What—have you done—?”

Movement spread behind his other eye, thorns pricking at the nerve, and waves of heat spread down his body. Undulating blackness constricted his vision into a point, and a weight settled around his chest like an iron maiden. Eye wide, no longer thinking of anything but escape, he gasped, “You—have to cut—cut it out of me—you have—to—”

From his side, a calm voice said, “You’re having a panic attack. I need you to focus on the light and count slowly to one hundred, please. Concentrate on the light.”

Paradoxically, as the weight crushed his chest, his limbs seemed to become feather-light, carried away on the tide of his blood. Finding the light through the tunnel was impossible. Even his hearing filled with the pounding of his heart until, finally, everything went blank.

 

* * *

dreaming,

he seizes,

synapses exploding.

 

time stops

time races

 

glimmering, the old world dances on an axis of dust

it revels in obscurity

shapes crowd the axis like angels (jealousy) chaos

 

they

bend

and

break

 

until they don’t.

 

they slide, flow, melt into each other

forming a stormy halo

orbiting the axis, never to touch it

 

in the morning, the young prince

flays his subjects with kindness

 

in the evening, the red alchemist

whispers stories to the darkness

 

their twine

paths together

 

the stories become the truth become the mythology

 

time resets

 

in the evening, the prince splinters under mortal divinity

in the morning, the alchemist waits

 

time resets

 

the spiral into madness is long and deep and

the crown melts

into a cage

 

time r e s e t s

 

the crown is not the cage. the crown is not the cage. the crown is nothing.

 

_time_ , whispers the alchemist. _time makes up the world. however, you have the power to change that; to make the world without such a cage. all you need to do is control that which controls time._

_how do i do that?_

_become god,_ says the alchemist, with a smile.

 

* * *

in san francisco, the future is red

red with fire, red with sunsets, red with summer

 

the siblings wait (worry) and wait (wonder) and wait (wish)

 

quentin, the scholar, the artist, who met his fate at six years old, who touches objects and sees their memories, who no longer sees his own face when he dreams

they fight

 

estelle, the rebel, the fighter, who sees no future for herself but fights to make one for quentin, who holds power in her eye but dreams of shark teeth and insidious whispers and cold green

they fight

 

etienne, the victim, the ghost, who moves from place to place, scraping by, but when he closes his eyes all he sees is fire and blood and a man in a wide-brimmed black hat, and it hurts

 

the red alchemist brews discontent in etienne, tethered to him, using him. the mad prince does the same in estelle, stirring her subconscious.

etienne tries to bend with his torment and breaks instead, but it calls quentin and estelle to his side.

 

blood calls to blood. together again. alive, awake.

 

they fight

they struggle

they win?

 

* * *

Dreams were strange. When he was small, Vincent’s dreams were saturated with color, overflowing with it. Even the most mundane situations became vivid, bright, even cheerful. But as he grew up the color leeched from them, dulling into monochromatic, lifeless scenes. Eventually he stopped remembering them entirely; spent nights senseless and unconscious.

Since Ravenscroft had abducted him, it was like all of his missing dreams converged upon him, frame by frantic frame. No longer were these ordinary or lifeless, but long threads of narrative drenched in shadow and light; chiaroscuro vignettes tailored to his psyche by Ravenscroft’s blood.

He knew, on some level, that he was dreaming now, but that didn’t make the scene before him any less real. At the very edge of earshot he could just make out a haunting melody of simple notes, perhaps from a music box. It sounded familiar, as dream-things often did, yet he was certain he had never heard it before.

Fingers of white sunlight caressed his shoulders and in the dream they were gentle, not knives of fire that tore at his flesh. Faintly, he thought he saw a silvery shadow against the rusting grey cars beside him, like a person pointing down the walkway. He stalked around the machines on young, gangly limbs in hand-me-down clothes, fifteen again, following the gesture and searching. Every creak of metal, every skitter of grit carried him forward.

When he turned the corner, he found what he sought; a mound of flesh with a human shape. It strained its arms, dragging itself along and leaving a garish red trail from its ruined leg, vivid in the otherwise colorless landscape. A long, thick construction nail pierced one of its knees, and when the flesh thing moved it whimpered with pain.

Vincent crouched in front of the creature, grasped its greasy hair and pulled up, considering the face. Acne scars cratered and marred its skin, leathery from too much sun, caked with dirt and drying blood. Unlike its skin, its nose was regal; long and tall with a hawk-like profile. It was the only admirable thing in its otherwise weak, embittered face.

Seeing Vincent before it, the thing bared yellow teeth, sweating with exertion. “Wake up. This is who you are,” it sneered, anything further lost as Vincent smashed it in the face with the flat of his hammer. The grinding crunch of its jaw breaking shuddered up his arm. Letting the head fall, he moved to its unwounded leg and took another wicked-looking nail from his back trouser pocket.

Positioning it just so, he jarred the spike through meat and bone, cracking the kneecap on its way. The flesh thing screamed, high and pitiful, and the hammer crashed down once more, hitting the same crack and shattering the bone.

For good measure, Vincent pounded the nail into the dirt as far as he could, though the wretched thing had stopped struggling and simply cried and whimpered as he worked. He didn’t need his quarry to escape a second time; how embarrassing.

He picked up the head by its hair again, and smiled at it, his bliss dissonant against the carnage. Fresh tear tracks cut through the filth on its face, and that just made the moment sweeter. “Better luck next time,” he said pleasantly, letting go, taking a last nail from his pocket and positioning it behind where he guessed the closest eye would be.

The flesh thing’s head split like a teacup shattering.

Watching oversaturated crimson consume grey dirt, Vincent became aware of a sound behind the silence, a drone like the hum of power lines, barely above the threshold of his hearing. As soon as he noticed it, it vanished behind the deceptively benign return of the music box.

He turned toward where he thought the sound was coming from and the world turned with him, eclipsing the bright corpse. Day became an unseasonably rainy summer night, the neon sign overhead gleaming in a wet blur. Out of the corner of his eye something flickered that was not rain, something sharp and hard. Ghostly, a translucent phantasm shaped like Cameron materialized out of the wet, falling together like shards of glass. Water plastered his shirt to his chest, more grey than white; bright but colorless to match the world around them. Vertebrae peeked through the gore where his throat used to be, blood trickling endlessly out of the bite wound.

The specter seemed to be mouthing a prayer, or perhaps a curse, eyes fixed accusingly on Vincent. No sound could be heard, however, and Vincent could not decipher his movements _._

Giving the specter his back, he ascended the short steps through the studio door, and into a mirrored hallway that seemed to stretch infinitely in all directions. He kept walking with the surety of the dreamer, and eventually he transcended the hallway into a windowless, empty white room. It might have been the dance studio, but it might have also been Ravenscroft’s bleak apartment cell. Or both, in the manner of dreams.

“Dance with me,” said a voice behind him, and it was Nick Reynolds’ dark eyes and awkward, adorable smile that he saw, but Ravenscroft’s accent in his ears. “Everyone left for the day. It’s just you and me here.”

“I really can’t,” he heard himself say, “I mean, you’re attractive and I’m flattered by your interest, but I’m already with someone else.”

Taking Vincent’s hands, Nick placed one at his waist and held the other firmly, slowly leading them into a waltz. “Then why did you come here?” Nick said.

“I needed to tell you in person,” he said, uncharacteristically vague, his feet and mind whirling as the scent of lavender drifted over them. They danced, and it made his heart ache and his teeth hurt. He felt like a fairytale princess, but he couldn’t decide if Nick was the prince or the dragon.

“You’re thinking much too hard about it. The answer is ‘you did it because you wanted to,’ and there’s no shame in that. We all want more than we have. Wake up and smell the roses, _lyubimiy_ ; nothing inside you is real.”

Nick bent him back, dipping him, and whispered into his ear while that scent filled his senses. “After all, you could have left already… but you still haven’t even let go of my hands.”

Nick pulled away only long enough for Vincent to glimpse light eyes, lowering Vincent gently to the floor, and then Nick kissed him like a drowning man seeking air. He kissed back without thinking, and by the time his brain caught up to his body Nick was already dragging his tongue harshly against one fang, drawing blood. “No, don’t—” he began, eyes flying open, but he was lying on a dusty floor now and Nick was nowhere in sight.

Revulsion crept up his throat as he recognized the room, sitting up. Decrepit couch sagging in the middle. Darkened ceiling from too many cigarettes. Carpet that was more hole than fiber.

He was home.

He had grown up in this ratty house, barely more than a two-story shack, with his father, his aunt, his two cousins, and his older sister. It wasn’t long before his cousins moved out themselves, but there were a few years at the beginning of his memory of… less unpleasant times.

His father was a mechanic, his aunt a saleswoman, but on the side they ran a small, dingy drug dealing group. Mostly they sold pills, but occasionally they came into some harder drugs and made some bonus money that month. It was a tired, washed-out crime for tired, washed-out people. Even as a child, Vincent knew what bad luck looked like. It looked like his family.

His mother had died giving birth to him, though he never did find out exactly how. His father changed after that, according to his aunt, but what good was the past when the present was grinding his nose into the dirt? His father ignored him at best, and at worst… Well. Sometimes the abuse was only words.

He started at the soft noise that carried in the sepulchral silence. At first he thought it was hissing, but it resolved into gasping sobs that someone desperately wanted to stifle. Someone upstairs was weeping.

There were three rooms upstairs; the master bedroom, where his father slept; a bathroom; and the bedroom he shared with his sister, Emily. At the top of the stairs it was hard to pinpoint the source of the sound; it seemed to float from one dark room to the next, taunting him.

“Emily?” he called, and the weeping stopped. He moved as softly as he could into what had been their shared bedroom; many nights curled around each other to protect, to deflect. It was dark, but just light enough to see shapes; the box of their dresser, their bed, the smaller boxes of a nightstand, a crate of books.

Nothing under the bed, no one beneath the covers. No one hiding in the dresser drawers. Yet still, the sounds continued, as if surrounding him at a distance. No one in the shower, nor hiding behind the bathroom door.

His father’s room was bright, silver sunlight illuminating motes of dust creeping around the walls. Sun-bleached paintings in cracked metal frames evoked a sense of timelessness and melancholy, like insects in amber. Boxes of crumbling books and magazines no more recent than 1970 cluttered the floor, stacked four or five feet high in places. Time capsules that were obsolete before Vincent was even born.

The weeping seemed to center as he neared the bed, coming from above. When he looked up a wave of white enveloped him, the sounds suffocatingly close, crushing his chest; liquid light pouring down his throat, up his nostrils.

It slid down his body, through him, thick and warm, and then he felt air on his face. The feeling of the liquid dissipated as if it were a membrane, a portal through which he passed to end up… where? A flat, grey stonescape for as far as his eye could see, though that was not far in the blindingly bright air. He turned in a circle, hoping for a marker to indicate his way, but nothing came.

He picked a direction and started walking, the soft crackle of grit under bare feet somehow comforting in its muffled crunch. No matter how far he walked he never tired, never felt the sting of thirst. Yet by the same token, nothing changed, always flat grey stone and bright white fog in every direction.

He stopped, feeling like a thick ooze had been scraped from over his brain, and yelled into the void. “What do you want?!”

“Want, want!” it echoed back at him, lonely, childish. A wasted effort; why would asking the dream even help?

He began walking again and thought he was imagining it when a patch of grey against the white became a human outline, nearing, focusing. It solidified into the shade of Cameron—no, no longer a shade, but corporeal—the positive to the previous negative images. Still bleeding endlessly, but tracking him, aware. Distantly he caught snatches of the music box tune, sorrowful and sparse.

“What do you want?” he said again, softer this time. “Why are you haunting me?”

“I’m the ghost of Christmas future, you arse,” he said wryly, voice clear despite his shredded vocal cords. The fog swirled into a familiar landscape of wet streets and closed shopfronts. At seven in the morning, Vincent should have been one of the many children dressing for school, laughing with friends as they walked to class. Even the first-years, as young as they were, belonged to one group or another.

But instead, he stumbled home on autopilot, aching from a long night shelving inventory at a local market, but pleased at least with the extra twenty quid in his pocket for good service.

He had run far away from the bloodbath at his home, carrying only about two hundred pounds and a folding knife. He ate once a day and hitched rides from strangers when he could, though they often did not stop for a bedraggled scarecrow-child with empty eyes. He thanked the ones that stopped, and made no trouble.

Eventually he made it to Birmingham.

The city hummed with more life than Vincent had ever seen in his wretched luckless home. It was easier than he had expected to find work at fifteen; even a wage of four pounds an hour under the table allowed him to eventually strike a deal with a local, less scrupulous landlord. Luck might have watched over his shoulder to ensure no one bothered him, but it could as easily have been his ghostly, brooding appearance that made people shy away.

Daydreaming of his futon and not having to move for the next six hours, he missed the warning signs until it was too late to run.

“Well who have we here lads, so early playing hooky?” someone said, slinging an arm around his shoulders. He tensed, reaching for his pocket.

“Leave me alone,” he said, steady on the balls of his feet, poised to run.

“Never seen his face before, Ed,” a boy said. There were four of them, gangly and freckled and pale, with almost identical bulldog faces. Seventh-years, maybe sixth, from their height and malformed stubble.

Vincent tried to duck out of the arm but it tightened around his neck and the boys laughed. “You ain’t getting away that easy,” the leader said, dragging him into the middle of their circle.

“Give us what’s in your pockets, hey, there’s a good lad,” a nasally voice said.

Vincent rolled his eyes. “You guys don’t look too bright, so I’ll keep my words small: Fuck off.”

The leader shook him hard, tightened around his throat. “Does giving us lip while we’ve got him surrounded seem like a good idea to you boys? It doesn’t to me.”

The others cackled a chorus of no’s, and the leader asked this time. “Hand over your money and we won’t beat the shit out of you.”

“I wouldn’t mind a good fight,” Vincent growled as he jammed a shoulder into the leader’s ribs and tried to heave him into the others.

They all dropped in a tangle of limbs like bowling pins, the arm around Vincent’s neck loosening enough for him to shove it over his head. He scrambled away from the pile and tried to stand but someone kicked his ankle and he fell again while toe-heavy kicks peppered his torso. He was surrounded by legs, fenced in too closely to get away.

On impulse he launched a headbutt at the nearest groin; hoping at least to break through the barrier. The hit was minimal but the element of surprise allowed him to bowl the seventh-year over, pinning him to the ground. His fist smashed into the boy’s face once, twice. On his third swing something caught his arm and held it fast while a brown blur filled his vision.

Agony exploded out from the center of his face, the blow rocking his head back and throwing black stars over his vision. Stunned, he only vaguely registered being dragged off of the seventh-year and tossed against the alley wall.

As hands rummaged through his pockets, he heard a new voice call out from the street.

“Hey, assholes!”

The hands retreated, and Vincent tried to prop himself better against the wall to see. Some of the black spots faded, and he saw a shadow in the alley opening.

“Any of you lot ever had a Norwegian Christmas?” the newcomer said, brandishing something in his hand.

The seventh-years looked at each other and shrugged. “We’re leaving,” the leader said, shouldering past the smaller kid. The others jeered at him, but left him alone.

When they were gone, the newcomer crouched to Vincent’s eye level. “You look awful. What did you do to them to get this kind of punishment?”

Vincent coughed, licked his lips. Blood continued to stream over them, and he gave up. “S—some… insults, some resistance, some... punches. The same old.”

He stood up, staggered, leaned against the wall. The other kid tried to sling Vincent’s arm around his shoulders to help him, but Vincent shrugged him off, moved away. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You sure about that? Looks broken to me. Maybe like you need a doctor.”

Vincent waved him off, started trudging in the direction of his flat. Some of the kicks had been harder than he thought; every other breath ached with future bruises. It didn’t feel like anything was broken except his nose, though.

The kid—not really a kid, he looked the same age as Vincent, but anyone privileged enough to go to school felt like a child to him—tagged along beside him, trying to look like he wasn’t concerned.

“My name’s Cameron,” he said after a while. “What’s yours?”

Vincent ignored him, hoping he would get the hint, but the kid was stubborn and creative—a bad combination, in his case.

“All right, if you don’t tell me I’ll need to make one up. Gotta call you something, you know? Hmm. Let’s go with… Julius.

“So Julius, don’t you have to go to school? What were you doing going the opposite direction of school, wearing an apron?”

Vincent ignored him.

Cameron, it seemed, was nothing if not determined. “I live just down there,” he said, pointing, but Vincent concentrated on his steps. Eventually Cameron would leave if he just kept quiet. It was just human nature to get bored.

But he arrived at his dirty, disheveled building, lawn balding and brown and studded with cigarette butts and beer cans, and Cameron hadn’t even paused the story he was telling.

“...So I told my mum and dad that I wanted to start taking karate but they said it was too dangerous to take evening classes here, and besides, no one teaches anything but kung fu anyway, so I said well, okay, I can live with that, how about letting me take kung fu, but they just ignored me. I just want to protect myself! And if that also means I can help other people, well, where’s the harm?” He kicked a can.

Vincent got to his door, room 108, a flat more like a cupboard than a home. “Go home. This is a bad place.”

“If it’s such a bad place, why are _you_ living here?” Cameron retorts. “Julius! Don’t tell me you and your family live in this one room!”

“It’s _Vincent_ ,” he said, exasperated, “and I live by myself.” As soon as the words left his mouth he kicked himself mentally. Volunteering information would only enforce Cameron’s determination to befriend him.

“I’m going inside now. Go home, Cameron.”

He pretended not to notice the slightly hopeful, slightly disappointed look on Cameron’s face as he shut the door.

It was a few weeks before he saw Cameron again, and this time he appeared on his doorstep looking like a raging bull, like a thunder cloud.

“Come with me,” he said, taking him by the arm and dragging him along until Vincent managed to hold his ground and take back his arm.

“Hey! I can’t go with you, okay? Some of us have to go to work.”

“I have a solution to that too, but you need to come with me first.”

Vincent started to protest, but the thunderclouds over Cameron’s face softened and he stopped.

“Look, you don’t have to be alone, you know that? I don’t know your situation, but I know that it’s bad, and it shouldn’t be! People are there to help you, including me, but you have to let them.”

“If you knew what my family was like, you wouldn’t think that,” Vincent said.

“Well, what were they like? I can’t know if you don’t share. Duh.” Cameron started walking. “Come on, walk with me and tell me.”

After a few moments, he turned back to Vincent impatiently. “Come _on_ ,” he said, gesturing him forward.

Being with Cameron gave Vincent the strangest, warmest feeling, and he didn’t know what to do with it. If pressed he might have called it friendship, yes, but they barely knew each other. Even at home, the friends he’d known had been… Well, more like study partners, people who didn’t hit him or jeer at him. People who tolerated his presence.

But a person who actually wanted him there, who wanted to help him, who took an interest in him? That was so rare as to be fictional. Against his better judgment, against the knowledge that such happiness was fleeting, he relented.

“I… have to call my work,” he said finally. “Wait there.”

Surprisingly, they let him off the hook despite such short notice. It was the first time he had ever called out, and his manager accepted his story of sickness with grace that belied his bulky, gruff exterior. Vincent followed Cameron.

“Where are we going?” he said.

But Cameron would have none of it. “No, nuh-uh. First you have to explain what you meant about your family—and why you’re not living with them.”

“They were awful people who led awful lives,” he said quietly. “They hated me and I hated them, so I ran away. Far enough away that they wouldn’t catch me.”

“So where are you from?” Cameron asked.

“We lived in Macclesfield, in Cheshire. I hitchhiked from there… It was surprisingly easy. Films make it look much worse than it is.”

He did not mention sleeping in the woods when he couldn’t catch a ride; going long enough after eating only a candy bar and a bottle of water that he almost couldn’t stand. He could at least save Cameron the gruesome details.

“So why here?”

“I didn’t have enough money to get farther than here. I’m lucky I even found a job as quick as I did. I could be a street rat, living in the underpass.”

“Yeah,” Cameron said darkly. “Real lucky.”

“So how come _you_ have the time to go picking up strays? I doubt your parents want you skipping class.”

Cameron’s eyes sparkled and suddenly Vincent had a very bad feeling about what he was going to say next. “Actually, I already talked to them about it. My mum wants to meet you, and if she likes you she wants to help.”

“Is—Is that where we’re going? To meet your parents?”

“Sort of. I’m taking you to the headmaster of my school. He’ll know what to do about you. It’s not fair for you to have to be on your own, we’re only fifteen! We haven’t been equipped with all the tools we need to be independent yet.”

“I’m doing fine on my own!” Vincent protested, but Cameron held up his hand.

“You live in a tiny room that’s probably crawling with bugs. You work yourself to exhaustion every day for a pittance that barely affords you rent. And now you have a broken nose that you set yourself because you refused to see a doctor,” he said, tweaking Vincent’s nose lightly. Even that touch elicited a deep twinge, making Vincent flinch.

“You’re barely afloat. I want to help,” Cameron finished.

Glowering, Vincent said nothing. It would be nice not to live on instant noodles and the occasional wilted side salad.

In the end, meeting with the headmaster was surprisingly insightful. There were plenty of programs that could assist with children in need, and he provided the forms to Vincent and instructed him to return them to him on his first day of class. He appointed Cameron as his mentor to help him get ready.

After that, Cameron took him to meet his mother.

When Vincent thought about her she always seemed so much bigger in his mind than she really was. She filled the space around her with life, with promise, always trying to bring out the very best in people. Cameron took after her a lot that way.

“Mum, this is Vincent, the friend I was telling you about. Vincent, this is my mother, Susanna Bishop.”

Vincent offered his hand with a polite, slightly worried smile. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Bishop. I’m sorry for intruding.”

She shook it with a firm grip, but her voice was not unkind as she said, “Pleased to meet you, Vincent. Do you have a last name?”

“MacLachlan, ma’am. Irish on my mother’s side, Palestinian on my father’s. He took her name, but... she’s gone now.”

Realizing how much he had just shared of himself, he paled. His feet were poised to run, but Susanna was in front of him and Cameron just behind, in front of the door. There was no way to escape without being caught.

Seeing his distress, she smiled. “You don’t have to be afraid. I deal with a lot of children in difficult situations. I will never talk to your parents without your presence or consent. Okay?”

He nodded, not quite able to look her in the eye. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, remembering his manners.

“Why don’t we sit and have some tea, and you can share what you feel comfortable with,” she offered, moving to take the whistling kettle off of the heat. “Is Earl Grey all right? We also have some Darjeeling, and a bit of jasmine green.”

“Earl Grey is good, thank you,” he said. Cameron nudged him and they sat at the kitchen table. Cameron’s house smelled of chilies and oranges and, not unpleasantly, of old books.

He told her the story of his parents, of his mother’s death, of their rundown drug deals. He did not mention Emily, or what his father did to her. He did not say they were dead.

He didn’t know if Susanna suspected anything of him, but she listened, and Cameron listened, and they cared. Walking out of Cameron’s modest house, the vibrancy of family and love echoing in his heart, Vincent remembered hope.

“Don’t you remember how fulfilled we felt, having each other?” Cameron’s avatar said as they returned to fog and cracked desert. “You can have that again. You can be happy! These things were done to you; you are _not responsible_ for the amount of suffering you’ve endured.”

Vincent laughed bitterly. “You say that, but I never told you what really happened to my parents. I was a monster even before I had fangs, I just knew how to hide it.”

He swiped a hand through the specter, scattering it like smoke, and the thin carpet and sagging walls of his childhood home surrounded him once more.

Emily was weeping openly now, sobbing softly on her small bed with her clothes in disarray. Spots of blood marred the bedspread, stood out garishly against the lightness of her thighs. His guts became glass, splintering as he processed the scene.

The slow, basso hum like current through power lines filled him again, tingeing his sight with red, and he realized what it was. Not just fury, not just hate, but a murderous lust like the taste of metal in the back of his throat.

The front door slammed, jarring him. He could hear flat, heavy footsteps in the entryway, caught a whiff of motor oil and followed it downstairs.

His father lurched into the hall, sticklike and tall, yet happier than Vincent had seen him in weeks. It made him look fifteen years younger, made him look less like a trainwreck and more like a person. He had never been handsome, perhaps mediocre at best, but there was a spark in his features that made them shine. Bile burned in the back of Vincent’s throat, noticing it.

“Does it feel that good, tearing someone’s life apart?” he said, trying so hard to stay calm that his voice was stilted, monotonous. His father ignored him, taking a cup half full of Tang from the fridge. He grabbed his father’s elbow, intending to turn him, but his fingers slipped and the plastic cup clattered to the floor. The thin orange liquid lapped at his feet, mesmerizing him.

“You have something to say to me?” his father growled, and Vincent tore his gaze up from the puddle. He saw immediately why his fingers had slipped.

His father’s front was covered in gore, head half-collapsed, hair matting over brain matter, right eye dribbling jelly down sunken cheeks. Maggots writhed in his open wounds, his nose, his jagged, broken knees. How did he not see it just now, this walking corpse? It smiled, raised its voice. “Jana! Come here!”

His aunt appeared behind him, smiling at her brother. “Is it time already?”

The sound of a drawer opening, then something thin and solid was pressed into Vincent’s hand. “Nothing inside you is real,” his father said. Vincent opened his hand, saw a half-rusted box cutter. The notches still extended out with satisfying, firm clicks.

In the dream, his aunt stepped forward with a placid smile, waiting. In Vincent’s memory he slapped her in the face, shoved her to the floor, held her down by her hair. But in a double image, sharp and bright and vibrant, he sawed open her throat with shaking hands, blood covering him in a baptism of red. It washed the shattered remnants of feeling away, replacing fear and anger and uncertainty with solid joy. Even her wretched gurgling death rattle couldn’t break that feeling.

A hand settled gently on his shoulder, accompanied by the faintest hint of lavender.

Vincent turned, the blood now sticky and tepid, tremors slowly migrating over his whole frame. Shock smothered his joy in ashy folds, muting everything. Dimly it registered that he was back in that white room, but the box cutter was still trapped in the vice of his hand. “This isn’t who I am,” he said numbly, hair obscuring his face. “This isn’t who I was supposed to be. It’s not real, it’s not real…”

Gently Ravenscroft brushed the hair from his face, tilted his face up. “Do you think that if you bury the urge to kill, it will bring you peace? Was it peace you felt, surrounded by people who would never understand you? Was it peace you felt, unable to sleep, listening to his breathing?”

Vincent swallowed, felt cold liquid drip from his fingers. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” he said, but it was breathy, uncertain. _I want to go home_ , he wanted to say, but the only thing he could associate with it was safety. Not a place, not a person. A feeling, and one that he could never capture. Something that he’s not sure he ever had, honestly.

“Do you know why I chose you?”

“It… It was part of the game,” Vincent said, steadier now. “I was a threat; I might have caught you. So I needed to be removed from the board.”

Ravenscroft laughed quietly at this. “Well, you’re not wrong, but that isn’t the only reason. It isn’t even the important one. I saw you with your family; the squalor, the neglect, the suffering. They despised you, treated you and your sister like dogs. It was only fair that they die.”

He sighed, and said, “But then you met Cameron, and you did the only thing you knew how to do. You emulated him, allowed him to be your master, your veil of decency. It even kept you safe, for a time, trapped in that bubble of gilded mediocrity. I chose you not just because you understood, but because you were running from yourself. Stop running,” he whispered, stepping close, enfolding Vincent in his arms. “This is who you are.”

Something hot and wet slid over Vincent’s hand, dripped onto the floor. He unclenched his fist and realized he had stuck two inches of rusty steel into Ravenscroft, dragged it out of him. He stared at the red blooming over Ravenscroft’s abdomen, thinking that he should be pleased, triumphant, but the only feeling he could muster behind the shock was a black speck of loss.

“It’s all right,” Ravenscroft said, placing his hands over Vincent’s, steadying the blade. “It’s all right.”

Ravenscroft stabbed himself with Vincent’s hand, over and over, the scent of blood and meat crawling down Vincent’s throat, red everywhere, again and again and again and again and—

 

* * *

Vincent woke with a heaving breath, almost a scream, his pulse jackhammering in his throat. The metal table was warm under his palms, leather straps still tightly binding—

_Palms_. Plural.

He flexed his right hand, extended and retracted his claws. The arm felt light, limber, no different than before the amputation. From what he could see it looked no different either.

How many times had he awakened, unable to move? No matter the number, the answer was _too many._ At any moment, Ravenscroft would slide up a chair, make an astute observation, try to distract Vincent from being imprisoned…

On cue, the door opened and in said devil strode, only this time his brow furrowed the smallest amount, his teeth clenched ever so slightly. On another face it might have looked like distraction, but on Ravenscroft it looked like cold fury.

“You seem upset,” Vincent rasped. The IV that had pierced his left arm had vanished, and so had the pinprick it might have left. It was impossible to tell how much time had passed since he’d last fed, but for the lack of pain.

“I hope you had good dreams,” was all Ravenscroft said in return. _Important dreams, you mean,_ Vincent thought. _Relevant dreams._ Dreams that weren’t an examination of damage, an admission of weakness.

Nervous energy sparked around Ravenscroft as he paced, suffusing the room, surprisingly devoid of the attentive, sadistic care Vincent had come to expect from him. Once, visiting the London Zoo, Vincent and Cameron encountered a Sumatran tiger, agitated, lashing its tail, a hair’s-breadth from sinking claws into the nearest flesh. So too was the man here teetering on the edge, some sort of psychological torment weighing him down.

He withdrew a silver cigarette case and a pack of matches from his jacket pocket, removed a black cigarette, struck a match. The earthy, slightly sharp scent of tobacco wafted over Vincent as Ravenscroft exhaled.

Vincent swallowed, tried again. “I saw something… strange. A sort of kaleidoscope of carnage. Spirits fighting each other in a landscape that alternated between oasis and wasteland. I could barely follow it, but… Somehow it seemed important.”

Explaining it that way, it sounded trite, like a children’s story. Color and texture had saturated the dream, but there had been no names, no dialogue, no context. Vincent wasn’t sure how to even begin to describe it; the narrative remained opaque to him despite being introduced to the players. Everything about it screamed _magic_ , screamed _otherworldly_. Even the flash of the Ravenscroft siblings seemed to surface from out of time, without an anchor to the present.

“I did see him… Etienne. Briefly, at the end, he and Estelle were struggling against a man with red hair, trying to banish him and take back Quentin’s soul. There was… a bridge, crossing over a bay. America. The sun was setting over it, making everything golden.”

Ravenscroft stopped moving, piercing Vincent with a bright stare, smoke wafting around his face. “San Francisco?” he asked.

Vincent shrugged with minimal success against the straps. It was the only place in America with a bridge like that, that he knew of. “Yes, from what little I know of it,” he said.

Ravenscroft resumed pacing, but he had schooled his expression into its regular neutrality. Still, he seemed troubled.

Finally, as if making a fateful decision, he said, “Shall I finish telling you about the house?”

“Please. I hate cliffhangers,” Vincent said. Sarcasm suffused his words, yet there was also a spark of curiosity he could not wholly suppress. Ravenscroft smirked slightly, hearing exactly what Vincent wanted to hide.

“I woke up in the hospital three days later, unable to speak, barely able to move my right side. The physical differences were obvious, but it was some time before I realized how much different my mental state had become. It wasn’t just depression, though there was plenty of that. It was like… I _knew_ the correct emotional responses to situations, but could not feel them. I didn’t laugh, didn’t cry. In fact, the only thing I seemed able to feel was irritability, and a kernel of frustration that grew larger every day.”

“Let me guess. This is where you tell me a demon stole your feelings, and now you’re on a quest for a heart.” Vincent feigned shock. “Does that make me Dorothy?”

Needling, needling.

A hungry look flickered over Ravenscroft’s eyes. “Ah, _lyubimiy_ , you do try my patience,” he said, with a brittle smile, and continued.

“Eventually, I learned that the fragment of magic sleeping within the house latched onto me, tried to burrow into my soul. It wanted to be alive so badly, but it hollowed out everyone it tried to bind with… Until me. Except, of course, that it almost burned up my mind trying to communicate.”

“I’m surprised it didn’t just scrape you out and use you as a host,” Vincent said. “Why would it need to attach to you to get what it wants?”

“This is an imperfect metaphor, but think of it like this: When water forms a puddle in the street, it’s useless. Not part of an ocean, unable to be drunk, too shallow to siphon. But once the water is put into a vessel, it can go anywhere, be part of anything, as long as it has a carrier. The fragment seeks to join its ocean, but it can only get there with help.”

He took a long drag from his cigarette, contemplating, and then stubbed it out. Finally he said, “‘A dream has power to poison sleep,’ Shelley said. The poet, Shelley. The fragment meant my dreams did not just possess such power, but they exercised it nightly. Every morning I woke covered in sweat, a fresh migraine driving needles into my eyes, feeling not refreshed but as if I had collided with a train.” He laughed softly, without humor. “As you can imagine, this did not help my emotional state.”

“What did you dream about?” Vincent said, no longer trying to hide his curiosity.

“What I dreamed… Was likely not dissimilar from your visions. But, well. It would be easier to show you.”

Ravenscroft shrugged out of his suit jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, and hung them on the doorknob at the far end of the room. Like his arms, his chest and back were covered in old dark-blue prison tattoos. Many of them possessed an austere beauty not unlike Russia itself. Perhaps the _vory_ even intended that metaphor; Ravenscroft surely did.

From the tray under Vincent’s operating table Ravenscroft withdrew a permanent marker and a large piece of smoked glass, placing the glass on a small table to Vincent’s right. Within the circle etched on the glass Ravenscroft drew a sigil; its appearance lay somewhere between a circuit board and the most complex of Chinese characters. It was not a language—at least, not one Vincent had ever encountered.

“This spell disintegrates whatever lies within the circle when it is triggered,” Ravenscroft said. “Think of it like a bomb, but with less mess.”

He braced his left forearm over the glass, within the circle, putting himself on display. A sick feeling constricted Vincent’s throat.

Ravenscroft’s mouth moved but Vincent heard no sound. Static crackled from hair to hair on his arms. The scent of blood charged the room. His mouth dried up as he tasted ozone.

The glass glinted, now empty, smeared with the blood leaking from Ravenscroft’s truncated arm. Silence descended but for Ravenscroft’s labored breathing. Inhale. Exhale.

Then sapphire-colored viscera exploded from Ravenscroft’s wound. Writhing, heaving, glistening.

A metallic, unholy shriek assaulted Vincent’s ears. Sticky filaments reached out like antennae, feeling, searching. He saw galaxies in its alien texture.

“This,” Ravenscroft called over the wail of the thing, “is a fragment of time.” Its mass didn’t seem real; surging over the wall in a heap it was twice Ravenscroft’s size, yet it had no weight to it. It looked almost like a window into space, a million stars peering out at Vincent. Vertigo enfolded him.

Ravenscroft began to sweat, focusing inward, and the thing contracted by slow inches. Its substance hardened, becoming waxy and porous like cobalt honeycomb, dripping with liquid that never touched the ground. But still the universe danced in the blue.

“It… doesn’t like to be startled,” Ravenscroft continued, breathing raggedly. “I managed to fuse with it almost completely after many unsuccessful experiments, and since then it tends to stay stable. But trying to use magic on it… It hates that.” The mass was almost arm-shaped now, almost small enough. The hexagonal grid started to melt together, tendrils retracting and twining into fingers.

“Although the fragment is not sapient in the same way we are, it possesses unparalleled awareness. It cannot speak, but it understands everything.

“So I slept and the fragment levied my past, present, and future at me purely at random. I fought it too much for it to try when I was awake, but asleep, I had no such defenses. Sometimes, though, when I was awake I could hear it singing just out of earshot, wavering in and out… Beautiful and terrifying.”

His arm creased, roughened, gathered its color and shifted from blue into beige and pink and red. It bore no stain of the eldritch presence within him, but it still carried the old blue ink from prison needles. A thought struck Vincent.

“It heals your wounds but leaves your tattoos?”

“Ah, you’re thinking of Nick. Yes, normally I let it form back around its first impression of me. But with enough coaxing it will erase even those old wounds.”

“Yet you still wear them? Despite the problems they invite?”

“In my line of work, removing them would cause more problems than it would solve. Not only that, but they’ve become a part of me. After so long I’d feel almost naked without them,” he said, and Vincent wasn’t sure if he imagined Ravenscroft’s slight leer.

Vincent considered, and then slowly said, “So if each tattoo has a story, like I’ve heard… Then why do you keep the unfinished one?”

Ravenscroft frowned slightly. He was quiet, lighting another cigarette as he considered his explanation.

“In Russian prisons, there are many rules if you want to avoid being the lowest of the low. Masculinity is paramount. When inmates see that a newcomer can be victimized, they waste no time in breaking them in.” His mouth twisted in disgust. “Sometimes with violence, but more often with sex. No one cares about the men who force themselves on others; they just want to ridicule the ones who get taken advantage of.”

Vincent gazed at this furious, calculating predator and could not fathom this facet of his history. “I don’t understand. They raped you just because you were... new?”

Ravenscroft let his face slide back into neutrality, exhaled a stream of smoke. “When I was a boy, I kept my thoughts to myself, did as I was told. I spent my time studying biology and dancing ballet when I was not learning the thieves’ code. And the first time I went to prison, I was fifteen. Being only one of these things might have allowed me to remain unbothered during my term, but being all of them? I didn’t stand a chance.”

Vincent recalled the memory-visions of Ravenscroft’s boyhood. In _vory_ culture, soft, scholarly boys either owned the strength that their elders beat into them, or else they lived as victims.

“Most of the time, if you were a _vor_ , prison was your life, and you took pride in being sent there. I hated it, but I learned to cope, grew armor.”

He bared his teeth. “I killed the ones who assaulted me and I made sure the rest of them all knew it.”

Another puzzle piece clicked into place. “You think we’re the same because we killed our tormentors young,” Vincent said.

Ravenscroft stubbed out his cigarette. “Reductive, but accurate. You may not see the resemblance now, but you will.”

And he left.

 

* * *

Ravenscroft let Vincent stew in starvation until he could bear to be away no longer.

He was not disappointed. Blood-withdrawal cast a thick layer of sweat over Vincent, a sheen that made his gaunt, grey skin glint like silver. Black fluid crusted his side where he had not managed to vomit far enough away from himself, and he sagged against the saltire.

A shudder racked through him, hard enough that Ravenscroft heard the clack of his teeth coming together, and then he stilled.

“Poor, sweet Vincent,” he murmured, lifting his head and wiping sweat-matted hair from his face. Vincent made a small sound, eyelids at half-mast, looking nothing short of wasted. His mouth quirked, eyes focusing somewhere to Ravenscroft’s left.

“ _S… Solnyshko…_ ”

Ravenscroft, who thought he could no longer be surprised, felt the stirrings of dread down his spine. Vincent’s unfocused eyes brightened with feverish intensity, an unnatural, lifeless smile spreading over his face.

“ _Ne—plach, ty… uzhe… ne m—mal… chik…_ ” he whispered. _Don’t cry, you’re not a small boy anymore._

It had been long enough since her death that Ravenscroft could remember his mother fondly, without fixating on the resentment he felt at her untimely passing. But still, the dragging out of such a memory, one he thought he had successfully locked away even from himself…

_I am no longer so weak,_ he wanted to say. But it wasn’t going to help. His mother was dead, and the hallucinations even of his strongest, most promising victim could not offer vindication.

Vincent shivered, that manic look passing from his face, replaced with submission. As if to reinforce the implication, he leaned into Ravenscroft’s hand, letting out a soft groan.

The sight, the sound sent a thrill of arousal through Ravenscroft, but indignation dogged its heels. Conflicting emotions warred within him, leaving him unable to decide whether he wanted to kill Vincent for sullying his mother’s words or kiss him for giving new life to her memory.

Gently he lowered Vincent’s head, letting it loll forward. Now was not the time to start acting on impulse, and especially not when Vincent was close to his breaking point. _Soon_ , he thought.

The pieces would fall into place, given time.

 

* * *

Hours later Ravenscroft returned, willing to forgive Vincent the perceived transgression, expecting him to be starved, ill-tempered, perhaps catatonic. What he received instead was a gift, an ember become flames, potential waiting to be fulfilled.

Vincent still hung limp on the cross, grey with illness and exhaustion. The difference now was the erection he had developed, painfully hard and almost bruise purple, a single vein raised and pulsing on one side. Starvation and withdrawal combined to create a truly formidable hell, though such a symptom was rare. Stepping closer Ravenscroft realized that a fine tremor had seized Vincent, and blood was trickling down his chin from where his teeth gouged deeply into his lip.

Even standing directly in front of him elicited no response, although his eyes were open. Ravenscroft considered for a moment what was different about Vincent’s face this time, and then he realized—already Vincent’s eyes had gone golden under the strain. The color, however, was only a thin ring between black and red, his pupils dilated with lust. He slid a smooth hand along Vincent’s cheek, tucking greasy strands of hair behind one ear, and Vincent started with a pained grunt.

“Good evening, _lyubimiy_. You seem to be in quite a state,” Ravenscroft said. He let his hand trail lower, lower, barely touching Vincent until he felt coarse hair and blood-heavy skin. He licked his lips and ran one long, perfect finger slowly along the underside of Vincent’s shaft, grazing the tip with a nail as he left. Vincent gasped, straining against his bonds, chasing that touch, but Ravenscroft had already stepped back.

A harsh shiver shook through him and he groaned, and Ravenscroft watched as his cock wept a clear, thick fluid. There was so much there, so much... Already Ravenscroft himself was half-hard, the sight of Vincent almost broken a potent aphrodisiac.

“H… Help me. It’s too much, I—can’t—” Vincent choked out, unable to finish his sentence, his eyes wide with terror.

Sensing a perfect opportunity, Ravenscroft said, “Before I do as you wish, you must do something for me.”

Whether Vincent had forgotten who he was speaking to or he just couldn’t find it in himself to care, Ravenscroft didn’t know. With desperate eyes he said, “Anything, anything—!” as if pain was only a distant memory. Ravenscroft imagined Vincent did think anything would be better than this looming insanity, this loss of control. Had their roles been reversed he would likely have agreed. Sometimes the flesh was pitifully weak.

“I want to extract one of your eyes,” he said.

Before Vincent could reply, Ravenscroft stepped forward again and wrapped that same perfect finger around Vincent’s shaft, saturating it with precome. Locking eyes with Vincent, Ravenscroft slowly brought his finger to his lips, licking the liquid from it inch by agonizing inch. Vincent spasmed and Ravenscroft could see his mind beginning to fracture, the word _please_ a madness mantra rapidly losing its meaning as it fell from bloody lips.

Relishing this exquisite dance, his absolute control over Vincent, Ravenscroft prompted him. “You have to tell me what you want,” he crooned softly, his own erection a perfect torture chafing against his fly.

Eyelids fluttering, Vincent groaned, struggling to assemble his thoughts, to remember the words. “My… eye, I w-want—you… to t—take—” was all he could get out, his voice splintering at the edges. Satisfied, Ravenscroft cupped Vincent’s face in one hand, kissing him softly. Vincent made small helpless noises against his lips, trying to drown himself in the kiss, and Ravenscroft reverently ran his tongue along Vincent’s wounded lip before drawing away.

He positioned his thumb in the corner of Vincent’s right eye, digging in slowly with a short blunt nail. Dark blood began seeping from underneath it, his thumb sliding carefully along the wet organ. Beneath his fingers Vincent writhed, pain and pleasure two sides of a single vast whirlpool of need, grinding his mind into pulp. Ravenscroft allowed his free hand to wander, curling lightly around Vincent’s cock, which trembled and thrust ineffectually at his pliant grip.

With a muted, wet pop Ravenscroft levered the eyeball out from the socket, straining against the extraocular muscles while Vincent arched against the pull. Ravenscroft curled bloody fingers firmly around it. “Are you ready?” he whispered, squeezing the organ slightly, wresting a strangled whimper from beneath him. Vincent rutted hard against the slight touch of Ravenscroft’s hand, heedless of the jostling of his eye, desperate for friction. Curious and amused and so very hard himself, Ravenscroft pumped Vincent’s cock, once, twice.

Finally Ravenscroft tore the eye free from nerve and muscle with one hand and dragged his grip harshly over the head of Vincent’s cock with the other. A raw scream tumbled from Vincent’s lips, his hips shuddering violently with the fury of his orgasm, still shakily seeking Ravenscroft’s hand through the aftershocks.

Ravenscroft grinned with bared teeth, eyes hooded, splattered with white. If he were a baser man, less obsessed with control, he might have brought himself to his own climax then and there. But he had other needs to attend to, was willing to wait as long as it took for Vincent to want him back, so he ignored the insistent throb at his groin and instead concentrated on the scene before him. One day, not far from then, he would come undone with Vincent, but that day was not today.

Vincent sagged against his bonds, head hanging, long hair tangled and greasy and obscuring his face. The alarming color was quickly leaving his cock now that that driving need had been sated, his skin returning to the uniform grey of sickness. Periodically he shuddered and twitched like an engine cooling.

Ravenscroft palmed the gore-covered eye, rolling it between fingers, admiring the narrow ring of yellow between huge black pupil and vast spiderweb of burst capillaries. Most of the time he cared little to save mementos from his victims, but with Vincent there was a persistent, not unpleasant itch whenever their eyes met. It made Ravenscroft want to preserve every part of him—even if the parts did grow back. He wondered if Vincent felt it too.

Vincent expelled a ragged cough and lifted his head. If before he had looked feverish, now he looked corpselike, the bags under his good eye more like bruise canyons. Strands of hair clung to the trail of blood on his face and tangled in the empty socket.

“I think—I found God,” he croaked haltingly, trying to sound unfazed.

“Did He have anything nice to say?” Ravenscroft said. Vincent opened his mouth to respond and then a flicker passed over his face, through his body, just before he retched. His angle was better this time, and he managed to direct most of the black liquid onto the floor instead of himself.

Vincent grimaced and spat out the last of the bitter bile, and said, “He told me He wished He had aborted you when He had the chance.” But instead of sounding defiant, he only sounded worn.

Ravenscroft let out a bark of laughter, cradling the eye in one hand and stepping around the inky pool to caress Vincent’s face. “Flattery will get you nowhere, you know.”

Vincent just closed his eye, fatigue finally crashing over him as he sagged once more against his restraints. Ravenscroft let his hand fall away. It wouldn’t be long before they came to the end of this round, awash in blood, Vincent’s mind scoured clean of everything but hunger.

Ravenscroft left to preserve his trophy, the first of many, and to wait.


End file.
